Timing is Everything? Electoral Legitimation and Autocratic Stability in Singapore

This paper accounts for how authoritarian regimes employ flawed elections in the pursuit of legitimacy. Seeking to prioritise the contribution of legitimation to autocratic stability, it is argued that ruling parties - with dictators at the helm - hold de jure competitive elections to claim what is termed autonomous legitimation. This denotes the feigning of conformity to the established rules of the constitution and the shared beliefs of citizens. Regardless of overall turnout and support, ruling parties aim to exploit the normative and symbolic value of elections in order to establish moral grounds for compliance within a dominant-subordinate relationship. In support of this argument, the case of Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) is analysed in historical and contemporary terms. Since 1959, the PAP has used precisely-timed elections to extract one or more mandate types from citizens and, by extension, claim legitimacy. In particular, the ruling party has sort an electoral mandate based on its response to an event, execution of a policy and/or collection of a reward. In the long run, autocratic stability has been achieved through a process of reciprocal reinforcement, which has combined autonomous legitimation with targeted co-optation and low intensity repression. By way of conclusion, the paper addresses the implications of authoritarian regimes using elections for legitimation. This includes their newfound capacity to resist endogenous and exogenous pressures for democracy.