Peeking behind the curtain: shades of political legitimacy in Singapore

It all happened so quickly. Last July, within a matter of days, four Singaporean politicians were forced to resign because of extramarital affairs. On the morning of July 17th, Lee Hsien Loong, the prime minister, announced that two of his colleagues from the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP)—Tan Chuan-Jin, Speaker of Parliament, and Cheng Li Hui, member of Parliament (MP)—were leaving politics after failing to end their affair, which he had first learnt about and told them to end in 2020.

Hours before, a mysterious video had emerged online, showing Leon Perera, a Workers’ Party (WP) MP, and Nicole Seah, its Youth Wing leader, in an act of intimacy. Two days later, Pritam Singh, WP chief, announced their resignations, noting that allegations about improper behaviour between them had first surfaced in 2021 (which Perera had denied at the time).

One moment, the public knew of two potentially damning high-profile extramarital affairs. And the next, our political landscape had expelled four prominent figures—including one, Tan, who was once touted as a possible prime minister.

The above events prompted extensive commentary and intense scrutiny locally and internationally. Most commentators attempted to prophesy the respective political fortunes of the PAP and the WP. 

More interesting, in our view, is what the scandals reveal about the contours of politics in Singapore—the so-called “rules-of-the-game”. The manner in which both affairs were revealed to the public, and almost immediately quashed, left us reeling.

Tempting as it may be, we should resist the urge to swiftly relegate these incidents to the annals of history. Rather, it’s worthwhile to question why they unfolded as they did, as if following a political playbook of sorts. 

Many corollary questions may be raised here. Why did the PAP choose that moment to announce Tan and Cheng’s affair? Who leaked the video, with impeccable timing, showing Perera and Seah? Did they really have to resign, or could the WP have weathered the inevitable political storm? As important as they are, we want to interrogate the following foundational question: who decides whether one is fit for public office or not? A discussion of legitimacy—the right to rule—is an appropriate starting point.

What enables governments to persist and weather crises, unpopular policies, and scandals is that they are seen, in some ultimate sense, to be legitimate. The importance of perception, “seen to be”, cannot be emphasised enough—legitimacy is not an objective fact, but an inter-subjective reality. It consists in shared understandings of “rightfulness”, and persists as long as a critical mass believes it’s there.

Where does legitimacy come from? There is no straight answer—it has different sources. But broadly speaking, legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder—it depends on what people think or, politically speaking, what people have been made to think.

A famous distinction concerns input and output legitimacy. Input legitimacy emphasises the importance of democratic processes. Such processes are meant to ensure that principles such as fairness, accountability and inclusivity are respected. Here, the participatory nature of government is thought to ensure its responsiveness to public concerns, or at the very least, the consensual exercise of authority.

Output legitimacy, meanwhile, stresses a government’s performance—or more specifically, its track record in delivering outcomes seen as desirable, like growth, stability, and public goods and services. 

One-party states like China and Vietnam, where input legitimacy is in short supply, tend to rely on output legitimacy instead. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party often argues that it is just as sensitive and responsive to its people’s needs, despite not possessing the institutions that accompany modern democracies like the US. (It also argues on occasion—surely in a bid to claim input legitimacy—that it governs in a consultative, inclusive manner, though this is typically taken less seriously.)

Hence, in more democratic polities, political legitimacy is thought to derive from the political process—institutions designed to keep one another in check, competitive elections, and the like. A government is politically legitimate to the extent that it operates within these boundaries and is accountable to the public, ultimately.

European democratic regimes have undergone their share of challenges of late. Growing income and wealth inequality, sluggish growth, global crises and technological disruption are common explanations for why citizens of democracies have, in recent years, agitated for government by unorthodox actors like right-wing parties, technocratic, and authoritarian “strongmen”-like characters. 

While these developments are anything but straightforward, there does appear to be some scepticism of the liberal-democratic function. Many argue that this is due to disgruntlement with what democracies have been able to provide their citizens with; or the lack thereof. And indeed, to the extent they are legitimate, regimes normally rely on input and output legitimacy, in varying amounts. 

As does the PAP government in Singapore—which, in the past, has often suggested there exists a trade-off between both forms of legitimacy. That is, relying on input legitimacy supposedly compromises output legitimacy, in that democratic processes would inadvertently engender greater political instability and short-termism. This, elites argue, ultimately trades earnest considerations of citizen welfare for more myopic political calculations.

As Dan Slater argues, post-independence parties accrue overwhelming legitimacy among citizens, because they are associated with ideals of self-determination, freedom, and autonomy. This provides a crucial reservoir of legitimacy for the PAP. Still, political legitimacy in Singapore is thought to consist less in processes than it does in outcomes, or what academics sometimes call “performance legitimacy”.

Historically, a chunk of the PAP government’s political legitimacy has come from delivering improvements in standards of living. This makes the regime’s perceived democratic deficits acceptable to many. (This approach to governance was arguably mimicked by the likes of China and Vietnam.)

The PAP’s self-styled “pragmatic” approach to legitimacy in the form of performance disavows “narrow” ideologies, instead claiming to do what’s necessary to further Singaporeans’ overall socio-economic prospects, national security, and standards of living. As Kenneth Paul Tan argues, by invoking “pragmatism”, the PAP masks its deep ideational commitments to capital-driven economic globalisation and political authoritarianism. By claiming to only do what’s necessary to further Singaporeans’ standards of living, the terms of debate are erased in favour of the PAP, since coming across as “non-pragmatic” is tantamount to political suicide.

This, in part, explains why the electorate puts up with the PAP government’s heavy-handedness. As long as the goods are delivered, people are willing to overlook incursions into their civil liberties and violations of their rights.

But there’s certainly more to the story. The PAP’s support has held rather steady, in spite of periods in which lapses in said performance were evident. 

As Chua Beng Huat helpfully recalls, there were three successive stages to the development of political legitimacy in Singapore: performance, personal morality, and communitarianism. 

Consider first that the unbridled pursuit of economic growth from the late 1960s onward, while fostering performance legitimacy, also birthed a sense of individualism, competitiveness, and elitism. These threatened to undo the social fabric stitched by the PAP. 

Enter ideology.

In the 1980s, the PAP began to inculcate supposed Confucian values in Singapore—filial piety, benevolence, harmony—first through the schools, ostensibly to halt the social dislocations engendered through rapid development. Despite mixed results, the lasting legacy of this is reflected in the self-image of the ruling party as junzi (honorable men), who rule benevolently over their subjects, motivated not by notions of the popular will, but by what is deemed right and beneficial. 

In turn, citizens are expected to honour the self-sacrificing junzi by granting them the “mandate” to rule (a modern update of the so-called “Mandate of Heaven”) through regular elections. In sum, this second stage of political legitimacy involved inculcating Confucian values of personal moral rectitude among politicians.

But the PAP still lacked a credo that could be disseminated not just among the political elite, but across society. The tabling of the January 1991 White Paper on Shared Values in Parliament might be long forgotten. But for all of us who used the now-iconic brown “exercise books” in school, etched in our memory are the “five shared values printed on their back pages: 

• Nation before community and society above self; 
• Family as the basic unit of society; 
• Community support and respect for the individual; 
• Consensus, not conflict; and 
• Racial and religious harmony 

Soon after, “Asian Values”—to which Lee Kuan Yew lent his voice, alongside the likes of Malaysia’s Mahathir and Indonesia’s Suharto—was hotly debated internationally as an explanandum for the phenomenal growth of Asian economies. Although the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis indubitably buried this discourse, Singapore would continue to emphasise the communitarian idea of “nation before self”, first introduced in the 1991 Shared Values discourse. 

This was the third stage of political legitimacy: Asian values as the basis of societal acquiescence to communitarian goals of nation building. Taken together, economic development offered the PAP performance legitimacy; the Confucian framework provided it a moral basis for its legitimacy; and the discourse on Shared Values/Asian Values justified the prioritisation of national goals, as articulated by the PAP, over all else. 

Having shaped the societal and political ideas that feed its brand of legitimacy (performance, personal morality, and communitarianism), the PAP has consistently dismissed alternative notions, notably liberal ones that stress the importance of democratic processes. This dismissal involves the regular ridiculing of opposition parties and politicians, from the likes of the late JB Jeyaretnam of the WP to Chee Soon Juan of the Singapore Democratic Party and Leong Mun Wai of the Progress Singapore Party. They have been regularly portrayed, not only by the PAP but by state-controlled media outfits, as lacking the very legitimacy that is supposedly the preserve of the Men in White.

While the PAP’s performance is competent, the opposition’s is poor; while PAP politicians are morally upright, opposition leaders are of dubious character; while the PAP has Singapore’s best interests at heart, the opposition only has its own. This is the popular narrative around political legitimacy in Singapore.

But the current WP does not fit easily into this neat binary. Low Thia Khiang, its former chief who was first elected to represent the Hougang constituency in the 1991 general election (GE)—a seat the party has not lost since—slowly but surely upended this idea that opposition politicians do not possess performance, moral, and communitarian legitimacy.

Singh, his successor, and the WP’s other current key politicians, have both inherited and cultivated this legitimacy. The WP is sometimes lampooned by its critics as “PAP-lite”. For one, its policy proposals are not radically different. It’s also perceived as a more responsible opposition party, a “co-driver” in Low’s memorable quip, whose role is merely to slap the driver (PAP) if they veer, and not to actually take over the wheel. And indeed, in its attempt to purchase legitimacy, the WP models itself off the PAP in certain respects. For instance, it has successfully managed to attract and field well-established candidates from the private sector and academia. Harpreet Singh Nehal, a senior counsel who has recently been spotted in party colours, is the latest indication of this. 

All that said, the PAP continues to denigrate the WP for any slip, as shown by the Aljunied-Hougang Town Council (AHTC) affair and Raeesah Khan’s parliamentary conduct. This was the backdrop for the events of July 2023.

Why, then, did they unfold so similarly? 

Scholars often use the term “hegemony” to describe the degree of success the PAP has had in shaping the political sensibilities of Singaporeans. The WP’s decision to let go of two of their members is an interesting decision—but one that is telling, ultimately, of these very sensibilities, and how entrenched they are.

“Hegemony” is more than just power or dominance. It is the ability to successfully shape preferences, and by doing so, redefine the terms of political contestation to one’s advantage. This is another crucial component of the PAP government’s legitimacy. When people think of political dominance, they often consider the use of force, coercion, electoral power, and so on. But a crucial aspect of dominance is ideational, which invokes the aspects of legitimacy discussed above.

During its 65 years of uninterrupted power, the PAP has co-opted major institutions, including the media; trade unions; grassroots, religious and communal organisations; and universities. The party’s ideological footprint is massive. With this outsized influence, it is able to ensure that its particular vision of governance permeates society. Thinking beyond a PAP frame of reference is not impossible, but when the boundaries of one’s imagination have been limited, conceiving of alternatives to mainstream ideas is not immediately forthcoming.

One of the key advantages of hegemony is the ability to define and control how political ideas, such as democracy, legitimacy and good governance, are understood. In this way, you can be dominant, without the need to dominate, per se. In Singapore, such political ideas are often articulated, implicitly or explicitly, through the twin ideological filters of Confucianism and communitarianism. 

For instance, recall that during the August 2nd sitting of Parliament, Lee admitted that he knew of the affair since 2020, and in hindsight regretted not forcing the issue earlier. His reasoning, in part, was that the delay was meant to cushion the impact that the scandal would have on the families, specifically the innocent “spouses and children”. 

The insertion of “family” into an inquiry about conflict of interest and improper conduct is noteworthy. In Singapore, family, and not the individual, is the basic unit of society. We know, for instance, that heterosexual marriage—and by extension, the nuclear family—is key to access public housing. Until recently, financial help, grants, and subsidies were also much easier for a nuclear family to obtain. “Family” is not merely a rhetorical term but one laden with political meaning—it is the foundation upon which crucial government policies are based.

By invoking the “family”, Lee effectively sidelined potentially embarrassing questions about impropriety within the PAP’s ranks, redefining the terms of the debate in his favour. This naturally shifted the mood from accusation to compassion. 

The request seemed innocent and reasonable enough—except when one notices the tension. Little such consideration seems to have been accorded to the families of opposition party members, such as Chee Soon Juan, or to government critics, such as Roy Ngerng, who were subject to crippling defamation suits. Granted, libel and extramarital affairs are different things. But the selective application of when—and which—families matter in Singapore, should give us sufficient pause. 

Indeed, the WP’s decision to let go of Perera and Seah also exemplifies this political emphasis on “family”. Never mind that both are relatively popular and well-liked, they, in the eyes of the electorate, were probably deemed to have violated the sanctity of the “family”, the basic unit of Singaporean society. Singh also noted that Perera had not been completely forthright with the party about the affair. Hence Perera and Seah’s offers to resign, and Singh’s subsequent acceptance of them, seemed like a foregone conclusion. On an official basis, Perera and Seah’s affair is less worrying than that between the speaker of Parliament and an MP of the ruling party. Beyond his duties as an MP, Perera is not in charge of any of the state’s functions. Seah remains unelected.

There’s more. The saga also reflects the PAP’s individuation of political legitimacy. The party has defined desirable politics over the years in terms of the character of the individuals that comprise government. 

For instance, when discussing the importance of good governance in his National Day Rally in 2000, Goh Chok Tong, then prime minister, added, “There are many examples of democratic elections producing flawed leaders…It is my responsibility as Prime Minister to ensure that there will be a good, honest and competent team of Ministers to take over from me and my older colleagues.” The logic of this is replete through the Group Representation Constituency system, by which MPs are elected en masse, and not directly, allowing younger MPs a coveted parliamentary seat simply because they were part of a team anchored by a heavyweight minister, and not because they had appeal per se. 

Indeed, the party has carefully cultivated a “whiter-than-white” image for itself, exemplified by its uniform—an incorruptible organisation that only recruits the most qualified, honest candidates. Private and public virtue are often conflated. Why, you might wonder. Well, it is but a reflection of the junzi self-image that the PAP has (and by extension, any worthy political opponent). 

To be clear, Singapore’s political elites do, on occasion, attempt to purchase democratic legitimacy for the regime. Nonetheless, individuating politics compensates for the democratic deficit in Singapore’s political system. The main message seems to be clear: recruit good, virtuous, highly educated men and women into government and you will have good politics. Because of this conflation of public and private virtue—a result, surely, of the PAP’s emphasis on recruiting the “best” candidates—other parties which aim to mount a credible challenge have had to follow suit.

But this ignores the institutional nature of politics and governance. Emphasising individual virtue, while important, is arguably insufficient to ensure good outcomes, especially when the goals that should be pursued are not really up for debate either.

This political emphasis on individual virtue clearly serves an important function, for it masks structural shortcomings. When considering the recent scandals, including the ongoing investigation into possible corruption by S Iswaran, a minister, the take-away is clear: the removal of errant politicians means that the system is once again legitimate. But this is to mistake the symptom for the cause.

Mature, reasoned political debate must make room for nuance—which requires appreciating context and interrogating the assumptions underlying key moments. How both parties managed the affairs denied Singaporeans the opportunity for debate of this sort.

What was most disconcerting about the saga was the hastiness with which everything occurred. That surely says something.

For one, there appears to be different standards for the PAP and other political players. Tan and Cheng were afforded a three-year grace period to stop their affair, yet did not comply. By contrast, Perera and Seah felt compelled to resign barely two days after the video surfaced online. 

But perhaps more importantly, the WP’s decision reflects precisely the PAP’s ideational stronghold; a scramble to salvage the party’s image from the wrecking ball sent its way. Because these ideas of legitimacy are, presumably, still widespread: the “family” is politically sacred, a “good political system” is the sum of its leaders’ characters, and a “good political leader” is not one that advocates for important causes necessarily, but one that leads a squeaky clean personal life.

Perhaps the choice seemed clear to Singapore’s leader of the opposition, owing to the need to keep the party’s influence growing come the next election term. The fallout from Raeesahgate, when Singh was judged by many across the political spectrum as having failed to act decisively enough, may also have influenced his actions here. By his doing so, however, we lost the opportunity to more deeply interrogate these ideas of political legitimacy—seemingly still taken for granted. After all, under conditions of hegemony, there’s a good argument that any meaningful political change has to be preceded by changes in the way we think.

Had Singh taken a leaf from Lee’s book and bought himself and the party more time while they investigated the matter internally, it might have had a ripple effect on political discourse in Singapore.

The PAP’s hegemony has narrowed the limits of political imagination in Singapore. But this saga was a golden, albeit squandered, opportunity to have widened, if ever so slightly, the horizons of that imagination. GE2011 is often seen as a momentous political moment, for being the first time an opposition party won a GRC, stretching the limits of what is politically possible in Singapore. But party competition does not, by itself, transform the terrain upon which this contestation takes place. 

All is not lost for the WP. They now have much time to regroup and plan for a future without Perera and Seah, ahead of the next GE, due by 2025. (A luxury they wouldn’t have been afforded had the video come out on the eve of the election.)

And so, while structural constraints matter, agential interventions are crucial in catalysing the conditions for change to occur.

Is the story over then? Lee cautioned that these scandals “happen from time to time” and will undoubtedly happen again in the future. Since it will happen again, should we buat bodoh in the meantime and rehash the same script when it does? We would be all the more impoverished, politically, if we did. To truly attain political maturity we must broaden our imagination. 

We should start by having conversations that matter. This would be our best defence against the unrelenting infantilisation of our collective political consciousness.

Brian Charles is a student of political theory, and is currently pursuing his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. He is interested in discourses, and has previously written about populism. He has won multiple awards in recognition of his teaching. 

Pradeep Krishnan is a PhD researcher at the University of St. Gallen, where he studies political psychology and public attitudes towards experts in Europe. He retains a keen interest in political discourse in Singapore. When he’s not fretting over Manchester United’s recent form, Pradeep also enjoys consuming existentialist novels and films.

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.