[roenxi]

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.

[arjie]

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.

[Pay08]

It's pretty common in countries that don't have strong democratic traditions. Democracy is just as much a culture as it is a political system.