Managing Political Change in Singapore

Lam Peng Er,Kevin Tan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136205262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Singapore parliament's creation of an elected presidency in 1991 was the biggest constitutional and political change in Singapore's modern era. This multi-disciplinary study gathers papers from leading scholars in law, history, political science and economics to examine how political change is managed in Singapore. It is an authoritative addition to debates surrounding the management of political change in developing countries more generally.

1 Introduction

Kevin Tan and Lam Peng Er

[Kingdoms which depend on the virtue of one man do not last, because they lose their virtue when his life is spent, and it seldom happens that it is revived by his successor.… The security of a republic or a kingdom, therefore, does not depend upon its ruler governing it prudently during his lifetime, but upon his so ordering it that, after his death, it may maintain itself in being.¹

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses

But if it is true that great princes seldom appear, how much more rare must a great lawgiver be? A prince has only to follow a model which the lawgiver provides. The lawgiver is the engineer who invents the machine: the prince is merely the mechanic who sets it up and operates it. Montesquieu says that at the birth of political societies, it is the leaders of the republic who shape the institutions but that afterwards it is the institutions which shape the leaders of the republic.²

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

This book examines the office of the elected presidency, the political context and rationale for its introduction, the political process which led to its adoption, its unique constitutional features vis-à-vis the executive, legislature and the judiciary, and its potential impact on the politics of Singapore. It also analyses the state’s first presidential election in 1993. The study of a key political institution which is now tightly woven into the country’s political fabric from a multidisciplinary approach (law, political science, history and economics) has much to inform us about the dynamics and dilemma of the city- state’s quest for political survival and institutionalization beyond the era of its Founding Fathers. Contemporary Singapore politics cannot be understood without examining the central institution of the elected presidency. In terms of per capita purchasing parity, the nation has become one of the globe’s top ten richest countries; it also possesses one of the most impressive financial reserves in the world. The elected presidency is, in part, specifically designed to safeguard its reserves which the country will draw upon for its survival in a domestic or international crisis.

Charismatic Founding Father and the Elected Presidency

Since 1959 when Singapore attained self-government, it has been governed by the People’s Action Party (PAP) led by Lee Kuan Yew. Few elected political leaders in the world can match Lee’s political longevity. Because he dominated the country’s politics uninterruptedly since 1959, he was in a unique position to shape its political landscape. Lee did not single-handedly build the nation but was aided by a team of able lieutenants. He was a necessary though not a sufficient factor for the impressive development of the city Republic.³ Despite abdicating his formal leadership positions⁴ and taking a back-seat role as senior minister, Lee remains extremely influential. Often considered to be modern Singapore’s Founding Father, Lee has left an indelible personal mark on its politics and society. He has anticipated potentially disruptive political changes and challenges, and has sought to bequeath Singapore a constitutional legacy which will ensure the long-term survival of the country. One such constitutional device is the elected presidency. Lee as the Founding Father is in a unique role to shape the Constitution. He proposed the scheme and helped to carry it through.

When Lee first formed the government in 1959 he was, as the prime minister, merely first among equals; over the years, he emerged as the undisputed leader who towered over his colleagues in the PAP. Although the first generation, old-guard PAP leaders were undoubtedly a capable lot, few had Lee’s charismatic touch. Even the pugnacious Devan Nair acknowledged Lee’s headship when he was the president, although protocol dictated otherwise:

[Nair] knew his place. For his abiding faith was that Singapore’s and his own leader was Mr Lee Kuan Yew. Even after he became Head of State, he would forget protocol when with close friends and refer to his Prime Minister as The Boss.⁵

In the decades after independence in 1965, the PAP succeeded in consolidating its position in Singapore. Since the opposition Barisan Sosialis’ abandonment of Parliament in 1968, the PAP has secured a near-monopoly of seats, and with that, the power to change the Constitution at will.⁶ Its hegemony of Parliament, and its strict adherence to the party line and insistence on party discipline through the party Whip enabled the PAP easily to secure the special majority of two-thirds required for Constitutional amendments. Amendments made to Singapore’s Constitution number, on average,⁷ one per year and several of the more recent amendments – including the elected presidency – evince a clear preoccupation with the issue of political change and succession.

New institutions and safeguards which promoted the PAP’s and probably Lee’s vision of a good state were entrenched in the Constitution. Clearly, these institutions were intended to outlast Lee’s tenure as Singapore’s paramount leader. These new and often innovative devices were not intended to apply to Lee or his current group of PAP stalwarts for they are ‘good rulers’. Instead, they were to be invoked at times when good rulers could not be found to run government, and when the weaknesses of human nature threatened the existence of Singapore. At such critical moments, these constitutional devices would be activated and good institutions would, hopefully, save the day.

When Singapore’s elected presidency was first introduced, the experiment was considered unique because the president has the mandate to veto certain governmental decisions, but lacks the power to initiate policies. While the mechanics of Singapore’s presidential system may appear unique, the underlying concern to build institutions to manage political and socio-economic change is universal. Samuel Huntington believes that the process of rapid modernization, social mobilization, urbanization, rising mass education and expectations, and democratization is potentially destabilizing. Instead of an emerging stable democratic polity with sustained economic growth, the upsurge of mass participation in politics may overload fledgling political institutions, resulting in political breakdown.⁸ Huntington advocates the strengthening of political institutions to contain and accommodate mass political participation as a prerequisite to political stability and economic development. Implicit in this authoritarian approach is the idea that mass democracy is potentially irrational but political executives may be counted upon to exercise their power wisely and rationally to promote political and economic development. In reality, the concentration of power in the hands of the executive is inherently problematic and dangerous; the axiom that absolute power corrupts absolutely should be a counterfoil to Huntington’s prescription for a powerful executive to manage change.

Singapore, like other political systems, faces the perennial question: how can we ensure that the political executive remains clean, accountable and effective? The office of the elected presidency would be unnecessary if the former British colony retained a functioning parliamentary Westminster system where a sizeable loyal opposition exists and checks the ruling party. In the absence of a credible political opposition in the nation, the executive is not seriously subjected to parliamentary checks and balances. Lee’s solution is to create another political institution, the elected presidency, to check the prime minister and his Cabinet. Conceivably, another plausible approach to prevent the abuse of executive power is the presence of a strong civil society which can check the state. However civil society is depoliticized and weak in Singapore. Professional bodies, the mass media, interest groups and intellectuals exercise little influence over an autonomous and powerful administrative and developmental state. Thus civil society cannot presently check the state in Singapore. The lack of a viable loyal opposition and a strong civil society, a peculiar situation created in part by the ruling PAP, necessitates the search for an institutional check on the executive.

Structure of the Book

In Chapter 2 historian Huang Jianli traces the antecedents of the elected presidency. He compares the terms of the first four presidents, who were elected by parliament rather than directly by the electorate, and argues that even though the office was essentially symbolic and ceremonial, the regime used the institution to promote nationhood and enhance ethnic harmony in a newly independent state with only a nascent sense of national identity. A unique unwritten convention was adopted: the highest office in the land was symbolically rotated among its ethnic groups; the first president was a Malay, followed by a Eurasian, an Indian and a Peranakan⁹ Chinese. Ethnic peace is an important prerequisite for the political stability and economic growth of multi-racial Singapore. With the aim of managing delicate ethnic relations, the norm of rotating the presidential office among different racial groups was one strategy to legitimize the ideology of a multiethnic nation rather than a Chinese state even though Singaporean Chinese form an overwhelming 75 per cent of the population. Given the county’s geopolitical location in a Malay sea (Malaysia and Indonesia), this approach seemed the most practical and sensible one.

Huang chooses a thematic rather than a chronological approach towards the office. He examines the process by which presidential candidates were selected, the influential politicians who nominated them, contrasting presidential styles, the doggedness of the Presidents in performing their roles even though most were plagued by ill health, their political contributions and problems, especially during the term of the third presidency which was marred by controversy and tragedy. Huang notes that contrary to the conventional wisdom that the earlier presidential system was apolitical since it lacked executive and other veto powers, it was indeed a politicized office which was used to serve the interest of nation building. It was an institution which helped to manage political change – the highest representation of the national ideology of multi-ethnicity and the creation of a new nation underpinned by such values.

The next three chapters by constitutional lawyers explore various legal aspects of the elected presidency. Kevin Tan begins with a conspectus of the key legal changes that have taken place from the first public articulation of the concept by Lee in 1984, through the two White Papers and the version of the Constitution (Amendment) Act 1991 that was finally adopted and passed. He goes on to argue that the transformation of the presidential office can be seen in the context of a recurring pattern of constitutional changes in Singapore to meet the political agenda of the ruling party. The PAP does not consider any aspect of the Constitution to be sacrosanct. Instead, it periodically changes the Constitution to fulfil its vision of a ‘good’ political system. Tan contextualizes the elected presidency amendments within other key significant constitutional changes which depart from the inherited Westminster system: Non-Constituency MPs, Nominated MPs, and Group Representation Constituencies where single member electoral districts are combined into bigger electoral districts and a single slate of candidates with different ethnic representation from a single party competes against another from a different party. Tan goes on to examine in detail the constitutional amendments made to the elected presidency and their legal and political implications. In his conclusion, Tan points out that while the institution must be tested before we can make a fair assessment of its effectiveness, ‘we have made the stakes much too high, and on those grounds alone, the scheme must be considered much too volatile for comfort’.

In the following chapter Thio Li-ann considers the perennial problem: who guards the guardians? This is an especially critical problem in Singapore where state and society are shaped by a one party dominant system. Unlike the British Westminster parliamentary model of politics which assumes a constant checking and balancing of power between two major parties, Singapore’s single party dominant system precludes the existence of viable opposition parties.¹⁰ As such, the problem of who should be made to check the executive in the exercise of its power and authority is especially acute in Singapore. Thio argues that the introduction of the elected presidency can be understood against this backdrop of a ‘parliamentary gap’. Although Singapore inherited the formal structures of the British Westminster system upon independence, a two party system did not emerge. Because of the need to check the guardians, the elected presidency – like the other major institutional amendments made since 1984 – was introduced to fill the missing ‘gap’ in the Westminster transplant. Of these amendments, Thio opines that the elected presidency is the most ‘revolutionary’ and that Singapore’s system of government stands at a threshold between presidentialism and parliamentarianism. She concludes by questioning the efficacy of this scheme as a device to deal with the ‘problem of over-centralized power’.

Valentine Winslow’s chapter focuses on the qualifications of the presidential candidate, and the process of electing a president. Analysing the relevant provisions, Winslow argues that the Constitution, as it stands, neither guarantees that the president shall be elected directly, nor that he shall be elected freely on the basis of universal franchise and equality in voting, and that a preferable enactment should follow the South Korean example. Winslow further argues that by pitching the qualifications of the presidential candidate in such elitist terms, Singapore has tried too hard to ensure a safe result, attempting to ‘write the Constitution like an insurance policy – so much so that the right of electors to choose the president who appeals best to them is diminished’.

In the next section, economist Tilak Doshi makes a thorough survey of the literature on political economy and constitutionalism. Basing his analysis on the work of leading scholars like James Buchanan and F. A. Hayek, Doshi points out that electoral democracies tend to be subjected to voters’ insatiable demands for increased consumption of public welfare. These electoral demands inevitably lead to the depletion of the national reserves and the accumulation of a deleterious public debt. Doshi argues that current intellectual understanding of public finance and government supports the Singapore government’s underlying arguments for introducing the elected presidency scheme. And if the scheme can truly check such populist pressure, it should be evaluated in a positive light.

Two chapters in the next section cover the first presidential election conducted in 1993. Entrepreneur and ex-Nominated Member of Parliament Chia Shih Teck presents a semi-autobiographical account of his public decision to offer himself to be a presidential candidate if no one else were willing to take up the challenge. For a brief moment Chia basked in the national limelight as a potential presidential candidate until an opponent – the reluctant Chua Kim Yeow – was persuaded to offer himself to run against the PAP-endorsed candidate. This chapter is not meant to be a heavy academic piece but to convey the atmosphere and the angst of the times from a perceptive participant-observer. Chia’s account offers a ‘ring-side seat’ at the contest.

Political scientist Hussin Mutalib perceives the elected presidency scheme as part of a continual process by the ruling party to tinker with various constitutional devices to perpetuate its power, especially in the wake of falling electoral support for the PAP. Hussin argues that the elected presidency and other institutional changes were made to manage and contain a younger and better educated electorate with rising expectations and a predilection to vote for political pluralism.

In the final chapter political scientist Lam Peng Er examines the public debate on the possible impact of the elected president on the future of Singapore politics. He conceives four different scenarios concerning the power relationship between the president and the prime minister in the post-Lee era. Lam argues that even in the best scenario where a ‘responsible president’ is faced with ‘good’ prime minister, there is still room for conflict and gridlock. So while the elected presidency may have been designed to safeguard the well-being of Singapore, a clash between two strong personalities with differing conceptions of a ‘good’ government is still possible and potentially catastrophic. Lam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The head of state in Singapore: an historical perspective
• 3. The presidency in Singapore: constitutional developments
• 4. The election of a president in a parliamentary system: choosing a pedigree or a hybrid?
• 5. The elected president and the legal control of government: quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
• 6. Chaining the Leviathan: a public choice interpretation of Singapore’s elected presidency
• 7. Singapore’s first elected presidency: the political motivations
• 8. Notes from the margin: reflections on the first presidential election, by a former Nominated Member of Parliament
• 9. The elected presidency: towards the twenty-first century
• Postscript
• Index