From what I've read (and this may very well be outdated), Singapore is generally democratic, but the PAP does such a good job of running the country that people don't vote for other parties.
PAP has exploited Singapore's strict libel laws to bankrupt opposition parties by suing for defamation. It is not so difficult to retain power when the opposition has no money for campaigning.
That's largely PAP propaganda. The sentiment on the ground is divided into these groups:
1. (an increasingly smaller portion) The PAP has done this well thus far and brought us to the first world
2. (a large portion) The PAP has too much power and can silence all its opposition - I don't want to suffer the consequences it has historically delivered upon its detractors by voting against them
3. (an increasingly larger portion) The PAP is good but it has too much power and has been allowed to engage in rampant authoritarianism and ivory tower bullshit - the opposition politicians would do a better job
4. The PAP is unequivocally bad and should never be in power (due to their historic actions like underpaying the Malay population for their land, operation Coldstore, etc.)
Additionally, the government blatantly engages in any tactics they can to get more votes, with documented widespread gerrymandering, holding snap election dates right after major PAP wins to capitalised on increased positive sentiment without giving opposition parties time to prepare, silencing/deplatforming opposition politicians, and enacting laws that prevent anyone but their chosen caste to be elected to positions of power
The PAP has ruthlessly gerrymandered their way into winning an overwhelming number of seats in recent elections. Most constituencies are Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) [1], which mean that many new PAP candidates can enter by riding on the coattails of a higher-profile veteran.
In 2025, the PAP emotionally blackmailed Singaporeans into voting for a Deputy Prime Minister [2] who was shifted to an at-risk GRC, with promises to navigate Singapore through the US tariffs that came to naught (my eyes are rolling so hard at writing this statement).
The PAP effectively controls the electoral boundaries, because the chairperson of the Electoral Boundaries Review Committee [3] is the Prime Minister's secretary, and the other members are all career civil servants who are incentivised to not rock the boat.
If the opposition had been allowed to contest in 2025 again with 2020's electoral constituencies, they would more likely have had far better results [4][5].
Yeah we've heard that before from people who turned out to be filthy liars. Not saying it is impossible, the Singapore numbers are borderline plausible, but if the leading party gets more than 60% of the vote I'm going to assume shenanigans unless I've seen some pretty strong evidence beyond what a propaganda department would put out. People don't agree with each other all that much.
Opposition can literally just converge to the PAP positions over time. Or internal factionalism causes a schism and leads to 2 parties forming from one overwhelming ruling party. In political settings there are enormous incentives to set up roughly 50-50 coalitions.
It’s interesting. They’re “cheating” a bit at least. They have these things called Group Representation Constituencies: multiple people represent a single constituency but you vote once for the team. So they’re clearly using this to up-weight areas they guarantee and to release ethnic cohesion voting (each team must have minority members in it). Interesting tricks that don’t require ballot stuffing etc.
It seems that Singapore/PAP figured out that policy control could effectively keep power without the violence traditionally associated with authoritarianism. I wonder what other dark arts they employ.