Open Collections

Zlomanova, Viktoria

University of British Columbia

This project traces the evolution of policy responsiveness in Singapore using novel text corpora that covers legislative discourse and public opinion from 1955 to 2010. In particular, this article quantifies significant shifts in policy responsiveness that emerged in late 1980s Singapore, and also identifies qualitative changes in the way public opinion is expressed. I propose two primary factors explaining these developments: (1) the rise of new participatory institutions in the late 1980s, namely the Feedback Unit and the Citizens’ Consultative Committees (CCCs), which encouraged the flow of public policy-related information into more controlled, less politically contentious domains; and (2) a transformation in the government’s strategy for addressing policy demands, moving towards private, direct engagements between the government and individuals, a shift brought about by the change in political leadership. This meant that the government began addressing public grievances and policy demands preemptively — before these grievances could be discussed in public or in Parliament, thereby restricting the availability of such information for non-incumbents. I argue that this shift entailed fundamental changes in how public discussion occurs, neutralizing the political nature of most policy demands without silencing them. To quantify these changes in policy responsiveness, the project analyzes over 125,000 public letters in newspapers and 20,000 parliamentary records from 1955 to 2010. These text corpora were assembled through extensive web scraping and OCR, refined via natural language processing (NLP) tools, and then analyzed through semantic embeddings generated by the Ada-002 model. The alignment between public letters and parliamentary records, quantified via calculating Euclidean distance between embeddings, provides a measure of policy responsiveness. Other pieces of evidence are sourced from the archival documents or available biographies of political elites. Overall, the 1980s Singapore presents a case in which increased policy responsiveness is delinked from democratic accountability and democratic contestation. Instead, the broadening of avenues for public policy demands went alongside a strategic redirection of policy-related information flows, ultimately consolidating the incumbents’ authority over this key information channel. The findings of this project, although specific to Singapore’s political history, shed light on the importance of information control for authoritarian resilience.

Text

2024-04-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88111

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/