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Singapore's 7 May 2011 general elections were a milestone in the country's political development. Taking place amid high economic growth (8.1 percent in the first quarter of 2011) and low unemployment (1.9 percent) but also rising living costs and an influx of foreign workers joining a tight labor market, the balloting for the 82 contested seats of the 87-member Parliament yielded surprising results: The long-ruling People's Action Party (PAP) won its smallest share of the popular vote (60.1 percent) since 1959, while the Workers' Party (WP) won the most seats ever for the opposition.
Some observers have asserted that Singapore has taken an important step toward democratization. Yet despite the opposition's landmark achievement-including winning a Group Representation Constituency (GRC), long thought to be an impossible feat-the ruling party still controls 93 percent of the seats, while the opposition can boast only six members of Parliament (MPs), all of whom are from the WP. In addition to the continued dominance of a single party, the country's draconian legal system, which severely limits civil and political liberties and thwarts genuine political competition, makes it difficult to classify Singapore even as an illiberal democracy. So after these elections, has anything about Singaporean politics changed?
In my view, the answer is a surprising yes. Singapore has gone from being simply an authoritarian regime to a being a competitive authoritarian regime. There is now a real possibility that the control of the government may turn over at some point. In their seminal 2002 article in these pages, "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism," Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way define competitive authoritarianism as a type of hybrid regime in which "formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. Incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy." Yet this type of regime has an "inherent source of instability" in that the opposition has periodic opportunities to challenge it.1 Conceivably, the opposition could unseat the PAP in the next round of elections, and I believe that the ruling party will not try to violate the rules of the game. The increasing competitiveness and demand for greater political opposition, however, do...