July 2008 | 135 Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 4, No.1: 135-153 Election Strategy and Ethnic Politics in Singapore Joel S. Fetzer Abstract According to Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s electoral system is essentially representative and does not suffer from signiicant ethnic conlict. Opposition leaders, however, denounce legislative elections as unfair and claim that Singapore’s ethnic minorities disagree politically with the Chinese-dominated People’s Action Party (PAP). This essay aims to test both of these hypotheses empirically, using freely available electoral and public- opinion data. Logistic regression of the 1968-2006 parliamentary election results by constituency indicates that the PAP government did create Group Representation Constituencies in 1988 so as to eliminate districts that had voted disproportionately for the opposition in 1984. Analysis using Gary King’s method of ecological inference suggests that ethic polarization between Chinese and Malays was moderately high in the 1976 election, peaked in 1988, and was minimal in 2006. Indians, meanwhile, appear to have voted with the Chinese in all three elections. A parallel cross-sectional, logistic regression of the 2002 Singapore subset of the World Values Survey, however, has Indian respondents being slightly less likely to admit to dissatisfaction with the government and indicates that being Malay does not make one more willing to express such dissatisfaction. These empirical results thus cast doubt on the extent to which Singapore’s elections have been truly free, fair, and devoid of ethnic tension. The indings also suggest that young, middle-class, highly educated Chinese have replaced working-class Malays as the greatest challenge to continued PAP dominance. Key words: Singapore, ethnic politics, elections, voting procedures, directed election, ecological inference, Chinese, Malays, Indians, People’s Action Party. Joel S. Fetzer is Associate Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Cali- fornia. <joel.fetzer@pepperdine.edu>. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the American Association for Chinese Studies in Richmond, Virginia.