Singapore's Shame 1 - Political Culture

Singapore's Shame (Chapter 1 - Political Culture)‏

By Dr James Gomez, Author, Self-Censorship: Singapore’s Shame

In political science, the term “political culture” has largely been understood as involving the norms, beliefs, values, sentiments and understandings that support a people’s perception of modalities of power and authority within a particular political system.

It is seen as setting theunrecorded ground rules as to how the political process will be played out (Pye, 1995). A particular political culture is assumed to arise as a result of historical development, contributing to the reproduction of the system or the processes that support such a culture.

There is an elite culture that operates among the leadership and its allies of a polity while a mass culture, which is less sophisticated but not very different from the top,operates among the people. Often the operation of political culture has been considered within the confines of the nation-state.

In contemporary times with the advent of the internet, globalization and the movement of labourand capital across continents, the production and maintenance of political culture also includes those who are accepted and expelled from theparameters of the nation-state as part of migration and immigration process.

“Political culture” shapes “political behaviour”, that is, patterns of political participation. It dictates and determines the political preferences of individuals in a system. In Singapore, it explains why people (both local and foreign) are willing to conform and engage only in politically sanctioned behaviour.

This holds true of not only Singapore citizens but also foreigners who take up citizenship and work rights opportunities in Singapore. Political culture and behaviour also seeks to explain individual or collective participation as well as non-participation in the political process. For instance, it can explain why in the Republic, with its limited political participation, there is little that falls outside of “approved” channels.

At the same time to also shed light on the reasons many Singapore citizens migrate and some why foreigners resident eventually move out or not continue their employment in the city-state. The net result is that the constraints on political participation have led to the rise of a dominant apathy in Singapore. But I do concede that in the last ten years there has been some movement towards political participation via online expressions with some of it spilling over into the offline world. However, the number of actors initiating such activities remains small but it contributes to the growing tensions with the dominant political culture.

Intertwined with political culture is “political attitude,” which marks the persistent psychological orientations and belief that underpin political opinions and voting patterns of the citizenry. It explains why citizens and foreigners alike residing in Singapore do not generally condone alternative political expression, why the ruling PAP is viewed as the only legitimate or “safe” choice, or why there is a general lack of ability to imagine a non-PAP government.

It accounts for the climate of fear surrounding opposition politics, political oriented civil society groups and individuals as well as acts of civil disobedience. Collectively, political “behaviour”and “attitudes” are part a complex interactive system that contribute to the production, re-production and operation of a political culture in a given society.

In the Singapore this is largely a politically self-censorial one. Although the whole notion of political culture (Almond Powell 1966; Almond and Verba 1988; Pye l995) has been made problematic with the post-modernist deconstruction of essentialisms, the debate within cultural studies is an ongoing one.

In this respect, political culture, behaviour and attitudes can be debated and meaningfully used to explain the phenomenon of politicalculture in Singapore. They are all aspects of the same thing. Still, the scientific recording of political culture is often raised as an issue, complicated by philosophical questions concern over what is scientific as well as the subjective nature of the topic.

Culture, which is marked by the uncertainties of human behaviour, is a difficult phenomenon to record through quantitative methods such as surveys and other quasi-quantitative procedures. Interpretative analysis by those knowledgeable of certain countries, the people and the system has beenrecognized as a helpful way to bridge this impasse.

Given the difficulties in methodology, in my first discussion of self-censorship ten years ago I modestly build on the limited works that have attempted to describe and record this phenomenon without actually employing a formal quantitative social science means.

Instead, I collaboratively employed secondary sources, participant-observation and interpretative analysis to unpack this political feature. Ten years on as a Singapore watcher and participant, I reflect further on the initial analysis and bring into the discussion the post-internet environment and how it has come to bear on the political culture of self-censorship.

In this exercise to understand the dominant political culture in Singapore,one needs to distinguish censorship by the state from acts of individual self-censorship, and actions taken by individuals to censor others and plot the relationship between them.

The two are separate and different mechanisms. Thus, they require dissimilar tools of argumentation, even though the former may lead to the latter. In between the two are the normal and frequently agreed agents of socialisation that determine censorship bythe people. These are the family, school, the various para-political institutions, national service, the work place, the local mainstream media and sub-structures in society at large.

These institutions contribute to the formation of attitudes but, in a centralised state as Singapore, these are principally influenced by the political. Therefore, the fostering and operation of such attitudes must be understood as being derived, to some extent, from the political system. For instance, the state’s censorship of information through the decades has contributed to an inability of the people to formulate a sustained political critique or opinion, even if they want to.

The internet to some extent has mitigated this situation but the mainstream media still dominates the information landscape. The self-censorship that emerges as a result can be attributed to a lack of confidence or a perceived incompetence in political matters because of a critical lack of information.

Even more importantly, it can be argued that phenomenon of self-censorship is one of the tools the PAP indirectly uses to maintain its political hold over the republic and itspeople. This is what I demarcate, describe and evaluate when I scrutinise the issue of political culture in Singapore: it is the in-built political self-checking system among the citizenry and foreigners that helps the ruling party less visibly maintain its grip on power.

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