How Do Singaporeans View Democracy – A Semantic Differential Study

Previous empirical studies with Repertory Grid and In-Depth-Interviews on young, well-educated Singaporeans' view on democracy have shown that regime outputs (such as prosperity and security) are weighted more heavily than the question of how democratically the country is governed. Instead of supporting liberal ideas of democracy, respondents showed a minimal democratic understanding that only includes elections. Most participants understood democracy only in terms of procedures that safeguard against rogue politicians. They did not consider it a necessity to further democratize, at least not when conditions are deemed unsuitable. Civil rights and equality seemed to be part of their concept of democracy only as part of a theoretical definition, but were seen as secondary priorities (Osterberg-Kaufmann/Stadelmaier 2020; Osterberg-Kaufmann/Teo 2022). The second major finding of this previous study is that young, highly educated Singaporeans can by no means be considered wholehearted supporters of liberal democracy. Even if they professed to fundamentally support democracy—defined as regular elections, freedom of expression, and opposition presence. Despite the literature noting higher preferences for democratic principles among more highly educated individuals (Welzel/Alvarez 2014; Mattes/Luescher-Mamashela 2012), most of these respondents were proponents of the core principles of the PAP’s ideology, namely security, pragmatism, and meritocracy, together with procedural democratic practice. In comparison, more far-reaching liberal freedoms played little or no role in their considerations of a preferred regime type (Osterberg-Kaufmann/Teo 2022). The PAP’s ideological Hegemony (Abdullah2018) seems to have convinced even the young, well-educated Singaporeans; a demographic usually considered in the literature as supporters of democracy and democratization. The question now is whether these findings also apply equally to all demographic groups in Singapore (age, social class, educational level, gender, ethnicity (Chinese, Malay, Hindi)). Based on representative data, the proposed paper aims to contribute to the question: How do Singaporeans view democracy? With regard to the efforts to develop a global concept of democracy in terms of the configurations of democracy (Osterberg-Kaufmann et al. 2022), the paper also aims to provide an empirical piece of the puzzle on the relevance of political self-efficacy as a possible underlying principle of any conception of democracy by investigating what political self-efficacy means to respondents and whether it is associated with democracy or other forms of governance. At the same time, the methods Repertory Grid and Semantic Differential will be discussed with regard to their potential as a mixed-method design for surveying the understanding of democracy beyond deductive survey logic. It allows us to capture the globally different semantic depth in the concept of democracy. Combining these approaches also reduces the limitations posed by cultural and linguistic equivalence as well as the phenomena of lip service and social desirability.