To make matters even worse for the opposition, many electoral districts are multi-member districts with ethnic quotas (Group Representation Constituency). This means that the winner gets to take all of the seats in the district (as many as four to six). With around 12 per cent of national popular votes, WP only gets 6.7 per cent of representation in parliament, for instance.
Second, since Singapore is a parliamentary system, PAP is the only party ever in power, and it dominates the parliament.
Consequently, PAP gets a lot of discretion to redraw electoral districts’ boundaries; decide on a snap election timing, and campaign length; and formulate electoral rules. New districts, a relatively sudden election, a short campaign period and the inflexibility to place candidates due to ethnic restrictions in GRCs, mean the opposition did not have much time or space to coordinate within and across parties, leading to suboptimal multi-cornered fights in constituencies.
Not only that, the opposition had to face the most successful single-party incumbent in the world, as well as fight against each other on a similar platform. At MacPherson Single Member Constituency for example, WP has to face PAP and another opposition party, the National Solidarity Party.
Third, PAP’s reign as a super-incumbent affects the political culture and attitude of voters.
PAP not only has ruled since Singapore’s independence, it has also provided high-levels of economic development and stability to Singaporeans. Voters who have never experienced a different government make-up could be very wary about the prospect of a slight change in government, possibly because they are not used to dealing with how political uncertainty could affect their wellbeing.
Fourth, PAP perfectly understands its advantageous position as a super-incumbent and picked the best electoral timing possible.
This year marks Singapore’s 50th anniversary of independence, also celebrating many development milestones, which the PAP can rightly exploit. Additionally, this is also the year of the late Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s passing and he was the man behind Singapore’s development.
These two events invoked heavy retrospective voting among voters which went beyond a normal business or electoral cycle. Rather than asking themselves the usual economic voting question—am I or is Singapore better off now than in 2011—voters might ask am I or is Singapore better of now than when PAP first came to power?
Knowing all these things, the 2015 election result does not look at all different from past election results.
The only slightly diverging electoral result was in 2011 when PAP only won 81 out of 87 seats, which was probably because it was the party’s first time dealing with significant online and digital campaigns.
It is therefore interesting that both local and international observers were led to believe that there would be a drastic change this election.
We might speculate whether the portrayal of a “freak election” was an intentional electoral strategy to exploit voters’ risk aversion.
Unless there are fundamental changes outlined above, we should not expect PAP’s regime survival and dominance to be seriously threatened.