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.
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