Backwards SG: the past and future of public deliberation in Singapore

With the heat and noise of GE2025 behind us, and the ordinary business of Parliament resumed, what does democracy look like for Singaporeans in the next five years? For most, it means seeing your member of Parliament (MP) occasionally amble around your neighbourhood, or perhaps appealing for a new covered walkway at their Meet-the-People Session. Some might reach to type a strongly worded post about the latest MRT breakdown or million-dollar HDB sale, or watch clips of the debates in Parliament. But beyond that, the thing called “democracy” softly recedes into the background of our lives once more.

What if it didn’t? Governments have increasingly been experimenting with new ways to involve citizens in policymaking beyond traditional electoral processes. From citizens’ assemblies to deliberative polling, public deliberation as a democratic process has gained prominence as a means of addressing socially divisive issues. Even in Singapore, a country lacking any strong liberal-democratic tradition, public consultation has a much longer history than one might think.

In 1997, then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong initiated the Singapore 21 Committee with the explicit goal of producing a new national vision for Singapore in the 21st century. It comprised MPs and representatives from different sectors of society, like trade unionists, teachers, and social workers. The Committee organised consultation sessions with over 6,000 citizens, before concluding that Singaporeans “do not just want to pursue economic and material needs. They want intellectual, emotional, spiritual, cultural, social fulfillment”. The Singapore 21 Committee marked a departure from the more aggressive and unilateral governing style of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) under Goh’s predecessor, Lee Kuan Yew, to one more open to, at least on the surface, public input.

But how genuine and holistic was the effort? While nominated MPs were involved, opposition MPs were explicitly excluded. Some of the Committee’s findings also strangely appear to have been a foregone conclusion prior to any public input. Goh, in launching the exercise, had already remarked that Singapore must “move beyond material progress, to a society which places people at its very centre”. Unsurprisingly, many perceived Singapore 21 to be essentially performative—even PAP MP Inderjit Singh later noted that “the Prime Minister didn’t even bother replying to the report in Parliament.”

Over a decade later, following the PAP’s historically poor results in the 2011 General Election (GE), Lee Hsien Loong, Goh’s successor, launched Our Singapore Conversation (OSC), a yearlong programme which involved 47,000 Singaporeans in hundreds of dialogues. Unlike Singapore 21, the campaign began with no “pre-set agenda”—leaving it to citizens to decide the pertinent issues—but again aimed to understand their high-level ideals and values. Dialogues were held everywhere from libraries to coffeeshops, and committee members came from wider backgrounds, including a polytechnic student and a taxi driver. Despite the opposition’s largest ever vote share and presence in Parliament since the 1960s, however, once again no opposition MPs were invited to take part in this deliberative exercise.

OSC concluded with the release of a report with 12 main perspectives, from “A Society with Diverse Definitions of Success” to “A Singapore for Singaporeans”. It is, however, difficult to attribute any concrete policy changes directly to OSC: the final report was explicitly described as “not a policy document”. Nonetheless, Kenneth Paul Tan, committee member and academic, was perhaps correct in observing that “instituting the habit of public participation and nurturing the skills to do this well are, in my view, a more important contribution of OSC than recording the aspirations that will feature in the final report.” 

Most recently, the Forward SG exercise by Lawrence Wong was again launched at a time of (relative) instability for the PAP government. GE 2020 saw the PAP lose a second GRC to the Workers’ Party; the selection of Wong as PM-in-waiting came after Heng Swee Keat had dropped out, the first time the party had bungled a leadership transition; and an increasingly unstable international environment posed new risks to Singapore. Much like the preceding large-scale exercises, the stated aim of Forward SG was to “refresh [Singapore’s] social compact” in a time of change. Forward SG involved 35,000 Singaporeans participating in face-to-face dialogues, and around 160,000 participating via surveys and roadshows.

Much like the Singapore 21 Committee, Wong announced the exercise’s intended outcomes before it began: namely, “a more open and compassionate meritocracy” with “more to help our workers tide over difficult times”. Unsurprisingly, the final Forward SG report adhered closely to this line and indeed was largely a self-congratulatory description of all the policies the government had already implemented to this effect. Not only were the actual contents of the dialogues and surveys not released, but many of the findings were merely restatements of the existing 4G leadership’s policy direction rather than anything truly new. And while the OSC report focused more on the voices and perspectives of participants, the Forward SG report read more like an election manifesto than the outcome of a deliberative exercise. 

What, then, is the point of these large-scale consultative exercises in Singapore?

Between Facts and Norms, a landmark 1992 work on deliberative democracy by German philosopher and social theorist Jurgen Habermas, offers clues. Habermas argued that in complex, “post-traditional” societies, we can no longer rely on the strong authority of uncritically accepted social norms and values, like religious or ritualistic beliefs, to act as a force for social integration. Instead, a complex society is identified by a “pluralisation of forms of life” and the separation of society into distinct spheres, be it economic or administrative. People act strategically and in self-interested ways, while social subsystems operate on their own internally defined terms—the market, for instance, understands only the logic of money, while the state apparatus functions in terms of administrative power.

The role of law and democracy, for Habermas, is therefore to act as a “counter-steering” mechanism by which the logics of the market and of the state are subordinated to the overriding communicative power of the people. Only through this function can law serve as a socially integrating and legitimising force: when people understand themselves as authors of the laws that they are subject to. To this end, legitimacy is founded on the kinds of agreement citizens reach, be it in practical discourses (how to do X), ethical discourses (whether X is what we as a people want for our society), or moral discourses (whether X serves justice). Communication is a means of social integration which derives from the shared orientation towards consensus and understanding that it implies in its participants. Habermas therefore approvingly quotes Hannah Arendt: “Power springs up between men when they act together, and it vanishes the moment they disperse.” 

Crucially, Habermas’ diagnosis extends not just to countries with a strong existing liberal-democratic history, but even more strongly to societies without this tradition which must distinguish “what is worth preserving from what should be rejected” from the constitutional democracies of the US and Western Europe. His theory depends not on any particular liberal culture, but rather on what he argues is the universal force of communicative presuppositions. Habermas therefore advocated for a “deliberative paradigm” of law, which draws its legitimacy from the reasoned agreement of all citizens arising from a discursive process. I will refer to this as the inherent value of public deliberation—that is, its legitimating and socially integrating function.

Understood in these terms, the PAP’s public consultations are attempts at legitimating practices, drawing upon the communicative power held by the people through dialogues and forums. It is also unsurprising why such initiatives are becoming more important as the increasing complexity of both our markets and our administrative apparatus threatens to cleave away from the popular will. Think of growing economic inequalities, or the recent ACRA-NRIC fiasco caused by the insularity of administrative decision-making. For a new leader like Wong prior to an election, it is crucial that his rule was rendered legitimate by its connection to what the people “really want”.

However, Forward SG and its predecessors cannot be said to truly reflect the kind of deliberation that leads to legitimate government in the long-term. Not only was the actual content of the dialogues opaque to the public—therefore putting into question the actual alignment of the report with the substance of the discussions—but the fact that the conclusions in the main appear to be pre-judged, suggest that the exercise was first and foremost a means to rubber-stamp Wong’s policy direction than to serve as an authentic means of producing reasoned consensus. This was a step back even from the conduct of OSC, which at the minimum was more transparent with its findings (even quoting participants directly). 

What might also strike observers is the similarity of the conclusions reached by the two exercises—essentially, a proposal for a more compassionate and open-minded society over the single-minded drive for traditional notions of success. Meanwhile, more politically unpalatable messages from the OSC report—like the public’s desire for a “Singapore for Singaporeans”—were notably absent from the Forward SG report. It is possible that the intervening ten years made Singaporeans big-hearted internationalists, but given nativist pressures globally, it’s perhaps more likely that such messages became liabilities for the PAP during the Population White Paper debate and in subsequent GEs, and were systematically purged from the final report.

More generally, each of the PAP’s consultative exercises have explicitly been top-down in their organisation, if not their substance. Political leaders often choose the topics of discussion, decide how the forums are to be organised, and produce the final report. In contrast, properly deliberative bodies should have more agency over both the angles from which to explore a certain issue and in developing solutions to it. As Cherian George, professor of media studies at Hong Kong Baptist University, put it, “In deliberation, as opposed to consultation or participation, there is a strong sense that the participants are treated as equals…in their right to be heard and also in their right to put things on the agenda.”

As a result of the government’s distortionary influences on these exercises, their legitimacy is undermined—the reports produced may not be reflective of the popular will or able to generate the kinds of consensus on difficult questions envisioned by their architects. Put another way, they may not be performing the legitimating and socially integrating function they’re meant to. 

Most notably, however, Habermas understood legislative bodies like Parliament to be epitomes of deliberative democracy, which channel ideas and concerns from informal public spheres to the political centre endowed with lawmaking powers. However, the PAP government has made great efforts to sideline the deliberative role of Parliament for this very reason, with many consultative exercises bypassing Parliament altogether and relying on direct relations between the public and the state administration. Even when parliamentarians are involved in the process (as in Singapore 21 and OSC), the exclusion of opposition MPs reveals how the deliberation assumes a partisan character, more akin to internal focus group discussions conducted by political parties in the West, but on a grander scale. Bills are often passed without amendment despite significant reservations from even the ruling party’s MPs. 

Perhaps the clearest sign of the PAP’s relative disregard of Parliament, however, is the fact that following a GE, Parliament is usually not convened for 4-5 months. This is despite the swearing-in of political officeholders happening in mere weeks. In contrast, legislative bodies in other democracies like the UK typically convene within weeks of an election. Justifying this practice, Wong Kan Seng, then minister for home affairs, suggested that the delay allows the government to consider and produce policies before they are submitted to Parliament. This answer reveals how the PAP considers Parliament to be primarily a body to approve decisions already made by the government, rather than a body which can meaningfully produce ideas of its own. In other words, there is a tendency to disregard Parliament’s deliberative function in favour of its formal role in passing legislation. 

The sidelining of Parliament takes place simultaneously with the reduction of public deliberation to mere “feedback” or the identification of “pain points”. Such a logic replaces the democratic political sphere with a firm-client model, where the extent of citizens’ political life is limited to articulating problems for the state to correct or giving suggestions for the state to consider. Far from subjecting the administrative power of the state to the communicative power of citizens, this model inverses the relationship and subordinates instead the preferences of citizens to the service of administrative decision-making. While these feedback mechanisms may be a decent enough substitute for the instrumental value of deliberation—improving policymaking—they are unable to perform the legitimating or socialising function that properly deliberative mechanisms do. 

This is even the case for opinion polling or comment-seeking on legislative changes. The government routinely uses polls to justify or validate proposed policy changes, such as when MHA defended the newly-introduced Maintenance of Racial Harmony Act early this year with reference to opinion polls signalling Singaporeans’ support for the Bill. However, it is crucial to understand that opinion polling is neither deliberative nor democratic in nature—the framing of questions may lead respondents to answer in ways that do not represent their true beliefs, and answers tend to be uninformed, especially about lesser known issues.

As one example, the government routinely points to sources like the Reuters Digital News Report to demonstrate how Singaporeans trust mainstream media. But Reuters itself has acknowledged that the relationship between media freedoms and trust in the media is complex. Above a certain level, higher freedom is correlated with higher trust, but below a certain level, the relationship flips: lower freedom is correlated with higher trust, possibly because conflict between the government and media is less known by the public. China, for instance, was placed top in the world for trust in media by the Edelman Trust Barometer. In short, a society’s level of “trust” in the media does not necessarily reflect the extent to which it is informed or educated on subjects. 

Fundamentally, unrefined public opinion tends to be a transitory and shaky grounds of legitimacy. An uninformed public, sequestered from good arguments and evidence, does not have the capability to come to durable consensus—for when the true consequences of policies are felt, support can quickly crumble. The practice of deliberation ensures that any consensus arrived at is reasoned, legitimate, and more durable.

In the end, while consultation with special interest groups may allow the government to understand various perspectives, it also shows the helplessness of the administrative subsystem in producing consensus on its own. As Chng admitted of the groups, “maybe we should have brought them together…and hopefully they can come to a consensus.” But such an approach continues to depend on a corporatist model of bargaining and negotiation between interest groups, which inevitably fails to produce consensus due to the divergent perspectives and values of each group. George notes, “following colonial practice, [the government] tends to go to authorised representatives [who] often have a vested interest in maintaining certain divisions” and emphasising their group’s distinctive values and preferences over coming to consensus. 

Instead, lasting consensus on difficult issues can only be generated via democratic procedure which allows Singaporeans to consider, in deliberative settings, the reasons offered by either side and decide on a clearer path forward in age-rating movies. Habermas cautions: 

“The integration of a highly complex society cannot be carried out in a systems-paternalistic fashion, that is, in a manner that bypasses the communicative power of the public of citizens. Semantically closed systems cannot be induced to invent on their own the common language necessary for the perception and articulation of the relevant issues and standards of evaluation that apply to society as a whole. For such tasks, an ordinary language is available…”

What undergirds many of the above weaknesses of the PAP’s model of consultative governance is its traditional dependence on a concept of political trusteeship, as analysed by sociologist Chua Beng Huat. As Chua observes, the PAP under Lee Kuan Yew was unapologetically authoritarian, whereas leaders from Goh Chok Tong onwards rely on the idea of being a “good guardian or trustee” of the people, drawing legitimacy both from periodic refreshments of a “mandate” granted in elections and from an ethical or even moral authority of a shared national tradition.

Rooted in these notions is the belief that a natural aristocracy must come to lead—a brilliant, technocratic class whose role is to implement and execute the policies necessary for the betterment of the whole. In a 1971 speech, Lee spoke of “some 300 key persons” on whose shoulders “the fate of millions often turns”. Indeed, Habermas responds to a similar idea of democracy as expressed by Bruce Ackerman, one where citizens only rarely awaken politically, and in the intervening periods politics is reduced to “the business of managers and bureaucrats”. 

What remains deficient in this conception, however, is the question of who defines the common good for the rest of society. As Habermas points out, it is far too reliant on the idea of a strong social-ethical consensus to guide political action—a condition which perhaps could be met when the necessity of maintaining public order, economic development, and improving living standards were the only concerns of a poor nation. But Singapore passed that point long ago. 

The democratisation (or, perhaps, polarisation) of political discourse and news sources with the advent of the Internet in the late 2000s is one cause of an increasingly frayed social-ethical consensus. This phenomenon is also marked by the growing boldness of civil society on a range of issues: from the death penalty to religious involvement in politics and activism over Israel-Palestine. The Workers’ Party’s strength as an entrenched political opposition, too, shows a sustained appetite for alternative voices. Once a preserve of the tumultuous 1950s and 60s, even student protests are making a return to the local political scene (albeit in a limited form). None of this is surprising, given Habermas’ assessment that any sufficiently modern, complex society will have its traditional assumptions and beliefs tested and subjected to communicative flows.

As cultural and societal pluralism appears to be here to stay, it is implausible that a trusteeship model based on consensus norms will be effective in securing trust and legitimacy in the long run. This is perhaps one reason why the PAP leadership has of late begun to rely more on quasi-deliberative exercises and notions of consultative government to bolster its legitimacy. 

In the final analysis, however, it is not sufficient for exercises like Forward SG to limit themselves to broad themes like a “social compact” or a “Singapore [participants] want to see”, or for the political sphere to be curtailed to feedback-provision. This approach hopes to preserve a certain latitude of decision-making for the PAP while factoring in citizen opinion. Yet, it is hard to see how such platitudes will effectively build social consensus on tackling the difficult and specific problems which lie ahead, many of which require unavoidable trade-offs between social groups. The S377A debate is one such issue where the PAP found itself unable to make a truly political decision, and ended up repealing it on purely legal grounds while postponing the substantive debate on marriage equality. 

One can imagine equally intractable dilemmas ahead, ranging from questions of wealth distribution and workers’ rights to environmental issues and housing policy. Labour immigration, in particular, is a long-standing thorn in the side of the PAP due to its failure to build consensus around a political position. This has manifested itself in everything from ugly “Anti-CECA” narratives on the street, to routine accusations in Parliament that opposition parties are indulging in racism or populism. Is it possible that the bitterness around this issue could’ve been mitigated if there were a genuine, informed public debate about what level of labour immigration is and isn’t acceptable? If Singaporeans felt that a matter as sensitive as immigration was subject to democratic scrutiny and control rather than imposed from above?

As the ethical force of a shared national tradition erodes, the only sustainable way for a political community to decide these issues legitimately is through the normative force of better arguments in deliberative settings.

Participants in these assemblies are selected randomly from society, but curated so as to be mostly representative of the country’s racial, religious, socio-economic, gender, and educational makeup. Over a few weekends, participants are given the opportunity to consider views and arguments from experts, civil servants, and activists, before engaging in small-group dialogues, working group discussions, and plenary sessions to exchange reasons and perspectives. At the end, they vote on the various options proposed. Once a given option is selected by a majority, a report is compiled with the outcome and the supporting reasons, and submitted to a legislative body for consideration and possible implementation into law. What is notable about these assemblies is their role in producing consensus about difficult and controversial topics. Despite the widespread unhappiness with the Macron government’s carbon taxes in 2019, for instance, polls indicated strong public support of over 65 percent for the citizen assembly’s proposals. 

However, a deliberative democracy is not limited to occasional and formal assemblies. Deliberation must become a part of everyday political practice. Arts and civil society groups must be free to persuade and influence their fellow citizens in support of particular causes without fear of censure. Parliament must vigorously take up its deliberative role instead of being primarily a rubber-stamp vehicle for the ruling party, and to this end must regularly refer particularly important but non-urgent legislation to bipartisan committees to be considered in more detail. At the grassroots level, more must be done to involve ordinary and otherwise apolitical Singaporeans in discussions on national issues. This will lead to an increased sense of trust and responsibility for political decisions taken, rather than the disinterest of a spectator or client, which undermines national identity and cohesion.

Perhaps one promising step in this direction is the case of certain MPs organising regular townhalls where constituents may discuss problems and solutions amongst themselves. This is a marked difference from the Meet-the-People-model of representative government, where one’s MP is seen as either a glorified letter-writer or a vehicle for airing policy grievances in Parliament. I visited one such townhall for Sengkang GRC, held in August 2025 by MPs Jamus Lim and Louis Chua. The event featured around 40-50 residents, who were split into small groups to discuss which issues they wanted to raise. In one exchange, a group suggested that Medisave premiums be reduced for those who don’t use medical services as often. A resident from another group then remarked that this change could backfire and harm the most vulnerable as Medisave is premised on a pooling of risk. In response, Lim suggested that the fundamental cause for high premiums is the increasing cost of healthcare services in Singapore, which could be controlled somewhat if fee schedules were introduced.

Similar discussions continued, with varying degrees of participation from residents, for about two hours. But what struck me was that first topic, where residents initially proposed a solution but were willing to accept reasoned critiques of it and consider the complexities of existing policies. As Lim later told me about the discussion, “[these conversations] allow everyone that’s here to witness for themselves the competing demands that people have for the same thing…We’ve had other sessions before this where residents are literally answering each [other’s questions].”

Doubtless, part of the reason why these open conversations are not the norm—especially when it comes to sensitive and controversial issues—is that the PAP fears creating a more divided, polarised society. But the lesson of the last decade is precisely that failing to build inclusive public spheres leads to festering resentment and distrust of institutions. As Singapore’s problems grow more complex, policy tradeoffs more evident, and contradictions between groups sharpen, a failure to build the institutions necessary to preserve social integration and legitimate government could lead to disaster. The PAP government has demonstrated that it has the organisational and administrative capabilities to build these inclusive and deliberative spaces—the question is whether it has the political will to do so openly and transparently. A changing set of national circumstances, and a changing citizenry, may force its hand.

Max Yeo is an undergraduate reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. Other writings can be found on his Substack, though this is his first published work.

Letters in response to this piece can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.