The People’s Action Party (PAP) has won its 13th consecutive general election since Singapore became an independent country. PAP won 83 out of 93 seats, a spectacular performance anywhere else. So why isn’t the ruling party smiling?
In this election, PAP obtained 61.2% of the popular vote. This is a significant decline from the 70% it commanded in the 2015 election. The bigger question though, is how the party obtained just over 60% of the votes but won nearly 90% of the seats.
Vote-seat disproportionality: Explaining Singaporeans’ wasted votes
This points to the fact that elections in Singapore are heavily gerrymandered and malapportioned. The country consistently has one of the highest vote-seat disproportionalities in the world.
Simply defined, vote-seat disproportionality refers to the gap between the number of votes obtained by a political party or candidate and the number of seats won by the party or candidate.
One cause of the high vote-seat disproportionality in Singapore is the combination of a first-past-the-post electoral system and the Group Representation Constituencies (GRC). The GRC, in effect since 1988, is a type of party bloc vote system in which members of parliament are elected as a team, with stipulated ethnic composition in specified constituencies.
The Gallagher Index, which measures the disproportionality between votes obtained and seats allotted, found Singapore’s electoral outcomes to be among the most unequal in the world. They scored worse than Australia, South Africa, Malaysia, South Korea, and India. Netina Tan, an associate professor in McMaster University, also demonstrates how this unusual rule exaggerates the legislative seat shares of the PAP.
The PAP is the only party whose percentage of seats are consistently higher than their percentage of votes. In 2011, an opposition party received 12% of the votes but did not win a single seat. Political scientists regard these as “wasted votes,” in which the voters’ preference do not translate into representation. It is usually an outcome of gerrymandering.
In this election however, gerrymandering backfired for the PAP. According to Wong Chin Huat, a professor at Sunway University, the hope was to prevent the Workers’ Party capturing a single member constituency seat in Punggol East*, only to lose three seats by creating the Sengkang GRC.
Expert Cited
