An Analysis Of Singapore 's Political Model With One Party' S Major Political Party System And Limited Political Competition

The reasons that the so-called Singapore Model draws researchers’ attentions are: one, it achieved world-renowned development with Confucianism; two, it entails a democratic system different from the Western mode of representative democracy, which is prevailing in this age. This paper set out to understand, therefore, does Singapore’s democratic system offer a new criteria for assessing democracy? It is known to all that modern democratic politics on the procedure of implementation is based on the general election system.Regardless of various forms, the election is in essence a kind of competition. With the emergence of political parties, the main carrier of political competition becomes each party. Therefore, we can simply say that modern democratic politics is a process that different political parties compete to get voters to support, so as to grasp the state power and to realize its ruling idea.So competition can be regarded as a keyword to understand modern democratic politics.Political competition, particularly competition among political parties, varies in various countries in its intensity. The degree division of political competition(mainly the party competition) can provide a new perspective for our understanding of democratic standards.The political competition can be divided into four basic categories according to its degrees, namely zero-competition, limited competition, unlimited competition and disordered competition. In modern democracy, limited and unlimited competition are normal practices, while the other two seldom work because they lack the basis of constitution. Moreover, limited competition outperformed unlimited competition in terms of eliminating problematic policies advocated by irrational voters, making its policies more coherent and integrating the society as a whole and so on. The paper analyzed Singapore’s dominant-party system and identified it as limited competition, of which the above-mentioned strengths brought about miraculous development of the nation as a result.Singapore and many other emerging countries experiencing the third wave of transformation show that the evaluationfor the democracy can’t simply copy the standard of western democracy, nor can the Western practice of representative democracy be blindly copied. The choice of the form of democracy should be changed according to the conditions of the different countries. The final judgment should be based on the government’s "good governance". Singapore is a good example of "good governance".Its unique competition among parties plays an important role in promoting the development of Singapore political.Therefore, with the example of Singapore, through the analysis of its political party system and the competition among parties, it has important theoretical and practical significance for us to think further about the forms of democracy.The political party system in Singapore is one-party dominant system. Between its ruling party——People’s Action Party—— and other opposition parties is a kind of limited political competition relations. This paper tries to answer the question: How does the limited political competitionreflect from the institutional structure in Singapore?Why would Singapore have formed such a Limited political competition mode?How does Singapore Limited political competition effect?Does it have any kind of general significance?To answer them,this paper is divided into five chapters, the first chapter is the theoretical analysis, mainly introduces the relation of party competition with different types of democracy and shows the significance of the limited competition.Chapter II dealt with institutional arrangement of the limited competition in Singapore, with an emphasis on political actors including the ruling Party, the opposing Parties and voters. Chapter III reviewed the course of development of Singapore’s practice of the limited competition and Chapter IV introduced the value system governing it. Chapter V concluded that limited competition in Singapore bring about both valuable political development and challenges in the new era.In a word, as a unique example, the success of the party limited competition style in Singapore provides us with a new perspective to rethink the political system and democratic model.