Thoughts on the opposition electoral strategy

Let us focus on two aspects of the opposition’s plans:

• Tampines GRC

With three opposition parties all expressing interest in this ward, Tampines GRC looks like it will have an interesting election ahead. But will it actually fall?

Judging from the 2006 election, most probably not. Tampines GRC leaned 2 points above the national average in the last election. A 19 point swing would be required to win there, which translates to roughly 20 000 votes.

That being said, it is definitely conceivable with the right campaigning. Afterall, the WP managed to cause a 12% swing towards it in Aljunied in the last election (relative to the national average). Assuming a 4% change in the national average in 2010, Tampines will then be 3% away from falling, a little too close for comfort.

In all likelihood however, this won’t happen, barring a sea change in politics (growing and massive voter outrage at housing prices could be a candidate)

• Chiam See Tong contesting Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC instead of Potong Pasir.

A highly risky move. Mr Chiam’s departure from Potong Pasir potentially leaves that seat up for grabs, while winning Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC is far from certain.

Granted, Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC has not seen a contest since its creation, and so the PAP team there has had little experience in campaigning. Matching them up against a veteran opposition leader could significantly increase the chance of an upset victory by the opposition, but there is one factor that makes this gamble far more risky.

This factor is the incumbent effect. What is it? Let me illustrate.

Currently, my MP is Mrs Halimah Yacob, and she has represented my ward for nearly 9 years and counting, and thus she has become a fixture of the constituency here, and most residents have met and interacted with her personally.

In effect, she (and the rest of her team) has become a known quantity in Jurong GRC.

Even though I currently do not have a preference for either party, and even though I may have disagreements with the PAP, given a choice between a known quantity and an entirely fresh team whom I have had no experience with, I could end up voting for the PAP just for this reason.

This effect helps to explain the staying power of both our PAP and Opposition MPs. It seems to be quite a significant effect too. Given the 18% difference between the WP in Hougang and Aljunied, I would probably estimate its magnitude at an additional 9% towards the incumbent.

While some think that Mr Chiam would have some benefit from being in a constituency adjacent to Bishan-Toa Payoh, I still think he will face an uphill battle there.

Conversely,  Potong Pasir becomes up for grabs. With 9% of the electorate whom formerly voted for the SDA now presumably split 50-50, the PAP would get 48.5% there based on the 2006 result making this a toss-up.

So is this worth it? Given the fact that the PAP is unlikely to do as well as it did in 2006, I think the SDA can still hold the seat with a good candidate and adequate preparation. So on balance, Mr Chiam stands to gain from this gamble.

Thoughts on the ST article “Boost education budget: Opposition”

Even though the aforementioned article is a miserly 12 paragraphs long and is buried in an inconspicuous corner, I find it actually quite insightful.

• The Reform party’s proposal to increase education spending to 5% of GDP.

Definitely a very good proposal, but needs to be fleshed out more fully. Most importantly, two questions should be answered.

1. Where is the funding for this proposal going to come from? Tax increases? Cuts in existing programs? The proposal will roughly mean an additional 4 billion dollars to be allocated this year, and this needs to be funded in order to maintain our long term finances.
2. How does the Reform party intend to spend this 5% of GDP? 5% of GDP will mean $12 billion dollars needs be allocated to existing programs, dwarfing even the existing defence budget. Thus, specific proposals are needed. For instance, does it intend to raise teachers pay? Increase funding to schools? Increase subsidies?

I think we should focus on the gap between premier and neighbourhood schools. Given the success of students in these schools, it is worth asking what exactly makes these schools excellent ones.

Thus, this proposal would not be complete without the creation of a task force that looks into the reason for their success. Afterall, without knowing what is needed to nurture good students, how can we propose ways to improve the current system?

• The proposal to let primary school students move to secondary school without taking the PSLE.

I don’t see the rationale for this. This proposal is manifestly bad.

Whereas the current IP programs in place requires students to obtain excellent PSLE results, this proposal will in effect cause more rich parents desperate for places in good schools to try all means to secure places in good primary schools (i.e. buying flats close to these schools).  This will squeeze out poor yet deserving students.

Furthermore, this will worsen the space crunch in these schools, while allowing some lucky students to only take the A levels just based on their parents luck. Can you imagine a 12 year integrated program from P1 all the way to JC 2? If students are to be given this privilege, they should at least be able to prove their merit, and this is where the PSLE comes in.

• The Government reaction to this proposal

To quote the ST, Mrs Josephine Teo thinks it is “unfair to look at Budget spending as a  gauge of the quality of Singapore’s education system.”

While I do agree, it is quite apparent that there are areas that increased funding would address, namely the poor facilities in neighbourhood schools compared to good ones. This proposal, if implemented correctly, would go a long way in providing all students equal opportunity.

Also, while budget funding does not reflect the quality of education, it does reflect the priorities of the government. In that sense, is it justifiable to allocate 4%-6% of GDP every single year to defence and $11.4 billion in the past fiscal year alone?

Most importantly, we should examine this in light of Mrs Josephine Teo’s comments. Is 4%-6% of GDP really needed to maintain the quality of our defence forces? Will it really “benefit young Singaporeans and secure our future” compared to tax cuts or investment in social infrastructure?

Given the significant share of defence in our budget, it is worth asking if the military can do less with more. If so, why should our government “increase the burden of taxpayers unnecessarily”?

Myth: The apathetic Singaporean voter

Despite what most people think, Singaporeans are not politically apathetic, at least with regards to voting. This can be seen through the following historical data:

• Persistently high voting rates

Historically, voter turnout on Election Day tends to hover around the 94%-95% range, well in excess of most countries. Of course, there are two caveats to this observation. Firstly, in Singapore, voting is compulsory, and this may persuade voters to vote even though they may not feel like it. Also, those whom have not voted in the past GE are removed from the electoral roll, which causes a self-selection effect (only people whom are interested in voting can vote).

Now our job is: Are these caveats significant? Our conclusion is no.

• Census population closely follows the electorate

The 2000 Census shows that there are 1.77 million residents above the age of 20 and are born in Singapore. This compares to the 2001 electorate of 2.03 M. Accounting for population growth and the fact that there are Singapore citizens whom are not born in Singapore, we find that the electorate as a whole closely matches that of the Singaporean population.

• People actually bother to pay to regain their vote.

This conclusion can be seen from the 1992 by-election in Marine Parade GRC. In the 1991 GE, 69,275 voters voted in Marine Parade, with 4757 voters forfeiting their voting rights.

Yet, in 1992, we find that 73,986 voters in Marine Parade were in the electoral roll. Meaning that the electorate shrunk by a net 46 voters.

It is unlikely that population growth is able to account for 4700 voters in just 1 year. This suggests that out of those 4757 voters whom did not vote, quite a substantial fraction bothered to go to re-register at the Elections Department (and even pay a nominal fee for that service!)

In certain aspects, this is bad for the opposition. With most voters on the electoral roll, the opposition cannot improve its performance substantially just by increasing voter turnout among its core supporters.

Rather, it unmistakably points to the conclusion that if the Opposition is to win, it needs to convert voters whom are currently voting for the PAP.

The gravest threat facing the nation

I understand that over the past few weeks, the blog has been entirely spammed with posts focusing on elections. This is because I will like to get these statistical analyses over before we get drafted for NS. With that seeming increasingly likely, I will now integrate a little more a lot more political coverage with statistics.

Before I introduce my political views in a subsequent post, I will first like to give a primer by stating what I view as the gravest threat facing the nation.

While the PAP feels that the nation suffers due to its weak national identity, the opposition feels that the PAP is a threat to national stability. However, I think both parties are wrong. The most serious threat to the nation is one that few realise:

People too often let others do their thinking for them.

Let me explain why this is the insidious danger to the republic.

• People come to expect government to come up with solutions rather than themselves.

Just read a local forum – any forum. You will probably find that much space is devoted to readers complaining about some problem and expecting the government to “take action”. Occasionally, a reader will actually devote a portion of his/her valuable time to suggest solutions, but that is unfortunately few and far between.

Without plenty of citizen input, our politics simply becomes dominated by what the PAP thinks the people want. This causes citizens to feel neglected about policy, causing them effectively cede their stake in government to the PAP.

Simply put, the nation does not feel like it owns the state, and lets the state chart the course of the nation instead of the other way around.

It also creates our culture of complaining about everything and anything. After all, if you don’t feel like you own it, you can criticise it as much as  you want.

• We lack a national conversation on critical issues of the day.

In a nutshell, people don’t know what the people really want. When they do know, they are unable to impose their will upon government (mostly due to the above point)

What do Singaporeans want? For contentious issues, ranging from the IRs to ministerial pay raises, the general reaction I get is a sense of both unhappiness and resignation. The popular consensus (or what we think is the popular consensus), simply cannot made itself heard, and most damningly, the people have come to accept this as the status quo.

• Political parties can easily mislead the masses with rhetoric and claims.

The result of a populace that outsources its thinking to politicians is that politicians have the power to put out false claims that are then accepted by the people. And by politicians, I mean politicians of all stripes.

For example, I cannot accepted the PAP’s purported strong economic foundation when it consistently pegs defence spending to 4%-6% of GDP, leading to  us spending more than $10 billion dollars every year. And even though the opposition consistently views transparency as a core virtue, there are actually very few concrete policy proposals on this sorely lacking front, leading me to wonder whether this is all just words.

• Lastly but most importantly, when the citizens fall asleep, the politicians come out to play.

Have you recently lamented about how the pro-civil liberties Lee Kuan Yew of yesteryear is so much different than the one we have today?

If yes, has it ever occurred to you that when the opposition finally takes power, what will actually prevent the WP of today from becoming the PAP of tomorrow?

Given the current political climate (see above points), pretty much nothing.

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely”. If we do not significantly address the institutional advantages that the ruling party holds, or hold all our politicians accountable to the public, we will be unable to guarantee the permanence of any human rights that any administration grants to the people.

Which is why we the people must ensure that as representatives of electors, MPs must reflect the will of the people and constantly hold them as a top priority.

In this regard, the political camps of today do nothing (or even capitalise on) this urgent problem. And until one of them recognises and takes action against this grave danger, I cannot support any one of them.

Thus, I hope this blog gets you thinking. It is the only way to protect the republic from its dark side.

The 2006 opposition party performance and the opposition voter profile.

Following up on yesterday, we tried to find out how voters perceive each opposition party. We did so by comparing the vote totals each opposition party gained in PAP held constituencies, summing them up and dividing by the total votes cast in those constituencies to get an “approval rating” against the PAP.

So, while 23.2% of voters preferred the SDP over the PAP, this figure soars to 31.7% for the SDA and climbs even higher to 37.2% for the WP.

What does this mean? Given the public’s general perception of the SDP, we can assume that these 23.2% of the voting population were mostly diehard opposition supporters. Thus, the generic opposition candidate in a two-way fight should get at least 20% of the vote.

Then, the higher percentages for the SDA and the WP suggest that a further fraction, consisting of about 10% to 20% of the electorate, are independents that are however persuadable to vote for the PAP. To win, the opposition needs to secure these voters.

This observation holds up in the 2001 GE, which was a good year for the PAP. In that year, the SDP garnered 20.4% of the vote, which was a 3% loss in vote share from 2006. In comparison, the SDA and WP experienced larger falls of 4.7% and 10.9% respectively. This trend is best explained by the loss of independent voters while the diehard supporters stayed put.

Judging from the difference between the vote totals in opposition held wards and PAP wards, we estimate another 10-20% of the electorate are voters that lean towards the PAP. These voters can be persuaded to vote for the opposition (given the opposition’s success in Potong Pasir and Hougang) but tend not to, instead preferring to vote for the more familiar incumbent.

Thus, in the current political climate, the opposition has some work to do in order to win. It has to secure voters that are not its natural supporters in order to win. This is not to say it is impossible, but we will need to see an opposition that appeals to the needs of these voters.

The 2006 PAP Scoreboard

By comparing local results to the national average, we can see which constituencies tend to favour the PAP and vice versa. The chart below shows how each contested constituency in 2006 lies relative to the nation, with bluer constituencies favouring the PAP and redder constituencies favouring the opposition.

Several interesting observations follow:

• Most constituencies lie within 2-3 points of the national average. This implies that the opposition can gain a substantial number of seats if it can narrow the PAP’s margin of victory to around the 50% mark.

• If the same conditions hold, expect Aljunied GRC to face a very close fight in 2010, especially if our forecast of a 4% fall in the PAP national average holds. That would put Aljunied GRC perilously close enough for a concerted opposition campaign to grab it away from the PAP.

• Not all opposition parties are created equal. We will explore this detail in an upcoming post, but for now, it should be noted that the purported “PAP strongholds” in this chart, namely Bukit Panjang SMC and Sembawang GRC, were all contested by the SDP.

The difference between local level elections and a national election.

We now zoom in from national level performance into PAP electoral performance in individual constituencies.

While previously, we suggested that PAP national performance was strongly constrained by the economy, it turns out that there is much more wiggle room on the local level. For instance, compare the results for Potong Pasir SMC and Choa Chu Kang SMC for the 1984 GE and thereafter.

The difference is quite stark. While the PAP’s performance in CCK SMC does not correlate very well with the national result as a whole, the reverse is true in Potong Pasir. In fact, they almost parallel each other, with the graph suggesting that the local PAP vote share in Potong Pasir increases by 1.02% for every 1% increase in the PAP national performance.

To me, this difference is likely due to the fact that Potong Pasir, given its status,  is a national bellwether while CCK is not.

Thus, while local concerns are more likely to persuade CCK voters, voters in Potong Pasir have to take into account the fact that their vote determines the fate of 1 out only 2 opposition MPs in Parliament. This causes the PAP performance there to follow the national mood in general.

Preliminary forecast for a likely 2010 GE

EDIT: With SM Goh dismissing the rumours, the chance of a 2010 GE appears less likely. Nevertheless, this post will still remain here for reference.

We have now come to the point where we can make an estimate of the results of a rumoured 2010 GE.

With the government forecasting 2.5% to 3.5% inflation, this GE will be different from the previous two conducted during periods of only 1% inflation. The model thus punishes the PAP and forecasts a poorer performance than the last GE, with the most likely scenario providing a 62.5% victory, more than 4% down from the last GE.

We provide 3 different scenarios from the perspective of the PAP, as forecast by the model (Economic data from here, while resident population growth estimates were from historical population data)

Unfortunately, the highly optimistic 6.5% growth forecast seems unlikely to occur in reality.The 5% upper bound by the government seems somewhat more likely, and yields 60.2%.

So, from current data, we estimate that 62.5% will be the most likely result, take or give 2.5%.

It is a somewhat unexpected result, given the comparatively excellent results by the PAP in the past two GEs. But we should note that the past two elections were somewhat an anomaly compared to the 1980s (excluding 1980 itself) and 1990s, where 60%-65% was the norm.

We also do realise that predicting the future is far more difficult than simply observing trends, and thus this exercise is not much more than throwing darts on a board. Nevertheless, we think its worth giving a shot.

“Its the economy,stupid!” with a twist

Apparently, what Bill Clinton said also applies in the Singapore context, but with a starkly different impact.

Following up on the previous post, we did a more sophisticated analysis on GEs after and including 1984 to yield the following relationship between the PAP vote percentage and year,inflation and annual growth:

PAP % = 407.2  −0.1664Y− 3.021I − 0.5881G

*Where Y stands for year (in A.D.), I stands for inflation (in %) and G stands for per capita real GDP growth from previous year (also in %).

This relationship is also rather strong, with the average deviation from the actual result being less than 0.3%

There are several important implications:

• The conventional wisdom that the PAP electoral performance improves with  the economy is untrue.

Evidently, the electorate seems more inclined to vote for the opposition in good times, and flocks back to the PAP when the nation faces economic hardship. This is likely to be due to the PAP’s much stronger economic record compared to the opposition.

• Political campaigns/strategies by both parties pale in significance to the importance of the economy.

If they were indeed important, this equation would not work so well. As it is, the relationship’s greatest deviation from reality was only a mere 0.65% during the 1997 election , leaving very little room for political strategising to make an observable difference.

• If the opposition does not improve, expect to see the PAP around for a very long time.

A sobering statistic: If we assume real GDP growth per capita remains at around 6.5% (as it was during 2007) and inflation stays at 2%, the earliest year the PAP vote percentage falls below 50% is between 2087/2088. And we haven’t factored in the fact that growth will slow down eventually.

Of course, this relationship isn’t foolproof. Things do change, and we would be surprised if it really took that long for the PAP to lose control of Parliament. But this model does provide an illuminating insight into what affects our political climate.