GE2025 Voter Education Portal

CAPE is an all-volunteer, youth-run, non-partisan community focused on research and fact-based civic literacy for Singaporeans. Our one-stop voter portal compiles information and analysis by ourselves, academics, journalists, and fellow citizens.

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Which political party is closest to your views? Find out now in CAPE’s VoterQuiz tool, a XX-question survey designed by our team that calculates your alignment with party platforms.

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How has your MP performed?

CAPE’s Parliament Tracker Project monitors legislative debates and MP performance across sittings. Track your MP’s performance in the 14th Parliament (2020-2025).

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Click on below for all you need to know about the basics of General Elections in Singapore. Some of these are external links to unaffiliated resources.

GE Basics

Election timelines

What is the role of an MP?

Who is my (current) MP?

Is your vote secret?

Party Breakdowns: Who, What, Where are the Parties contesting in GE2025

What does the Government actually do? CAPE’s Government 101 explainer of the functions and branches of Singapore’s government

See the Elections Department (ELD) for additional, official resources on voting basics!

Understanding Singapore’s unique electoral environment

With a ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) that has dominated Singapore’s political landscape¹ for its entire 60-year history as an independent nation, our electoral system has unique quirks that work for our society and sometimes do not. This makes understanding how democracy works in Singapore difficult, given the lack of public understanding and civic literacy. Our resources below seek to provide a digestible bite-sized explainers and analysis for voters.

What are voters actually voting for?

Unlike other democracies where voters tend to vote along a left-right policy split, Singaporean voter behaviour can be different due to the unique nature of our country’s politics:

We have a dominant party system: The PAP is one of the longest-ruling political parties in the world, and Singapore has had the same ruling party since even before Independence.² The PAP also retains a 90% supermajority in Parliament.
The PAP wants opposition candidates who lost elections to get represented in Parliament.³
Meanwhile, the main opposition party, the Workers’ Party, has reassured voters that it does not want to win an Election. ⁴

Click on the following tabs to understand some types of voters in Singapore. Voting behaviours might consist of a combination of these voting patterns.

The Singapore Story voter

Voters might vote for the PAP for its performance legitimacy. Through its early decades of governance, the PAP has accomplished concrete goals of growth, stability, and unity.⁵ These accomplishments are reflected in the “miracle” of the Singapore Story tracking how the PAP has led Singapore’s development from a newly independent colony to a prosperous city state.

Furthermore, in our current day, the PAP government continues to closely monitors public sentiment and respond rapidly to feedback and complaints at both a municipal to national level. ⁶

Therefore, the PAP’s good performance legitimises the government and incentivises voters to choose it again. Sociologist Chua Beng Huat describes the resultant popularity of the PAP as “performance legitimacy”.⁷

The Don’t Rock the Boat voter

Voters might vote for the PAP out of a sense of security and stability. Over the decades, PAP leaders have communicated and practiced an ideology of vulnerability: that Singapore is a vulnerable nation which cannot survive without economic growth, meritocracy, and credible leadership.⁸

Through decades of policy and messaging, Singapore’s society and culture have internalized and reinforced this belief.⁹ Thus, voters prefer a party that promises to deliver in these areas, rather than others. The only such party that can deliver this is the PAP, because it is already the dominant party. It has a track record of economic development. And it can attract higher-quality political candidates than Opposition parties.¹⁰

Some Opposition parties such as WP have in fact played to this voting behaviour, such as by reassuring voters that it does not want to win an election, and articulating its role as a check-and-balance against a PAP government.

The Left-of-Centre voter

Voters may choose the opposition because they prefer different policy outcomes.

But opposition parties which deviate slightly from the PAP, like the WP, perform better than opposition parties with very different priorities, like the SDP.¹¹ This suggests that the average voter shares the PAP’s overarching beliefs about the country—and likely still wants it to form the government.
This explains why, to get votes, opposition parties downplay their chances of forming the next government.

Fears of a “freak” election –– where the PAP loses more than just a few seats, but also the election itself –– might convince such a voter not to vote for opposition parties. Such fears have been criticised as overblown.¹²

The Check and Balance voter

Voters may choose the Opposition because they want more Opposition voices and not necessarily because they do not want a PAP government. They might view the current PAP supermajority as an imbalance that is unhealthy for Singapore’s democracy and politics. Some of these voters might even be pro-PAP government voters.

Such voters might also be dissatisfied with perceived unfair electoral rules. The PAP has consistently won more seats in Parliament than its share of the popular vote. This is for several reasons:

The PAP wins seats more easily under the GRC system. It is easier for a dominant party to field multiple good candidates, compared to the opposition. The bigger the GRCs, the bigger the PAP’s wins.¹³
The PAP benefiting from our First-Past-The-Post system which has a winner-takes-all effect, resulting in large wins even with slim majorities.
Perceptions of gerrymandering and malapportionment where changes to constituency boundaries are seen to redistribute PAP support to deliver more seats. For instance, constituencies with lower-than-average PAP support appear to often be dissolved or merged.¹⁴

Overall, this maximises the seats won by the PAP, despite a declining share of all votes.

Thus, some voters choose the opposition not because they prefer the party or candidate. But simply as a tactic to increase the opposition’s seats in Parliament and check the PAP’s overwhelming majority.

The Single Issue voter

Single issue voters exist in Singapore too. These are voters who vote based on their position on a single policy position. This can be either at the candidate-level or Party-level positions.

Common issues in Singapore can include: economy and specific economic policies such as tax breaks on certain industries or socio-economic classes, LGBTQ+ rights versus “family values”, Israel-Palestine, and climate policy.

The Party Loyalist

The Don’t-Punish-Me voter

Voters might vote for the PAP (even if they prefer not to) due to a perceived fear of “reprisals” from the government.

This might take two forms:

A fear that their constituency will be “punished” for voting in an Opposition party through withheld municipal privileges and upgrading. In a famous example, the then-Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew warned Aljunied voters in 2011 that they will “pay a price, the hard way” if they voted in the WP.¹⁵
A mistaken belief that their ballot is not secret and can be traced to them, and the government would carry out reprisals on access to HDB housing, primary schools, civil service jobs, and public sector contracts. According to research by Ostwald & Riambau (2023), an estimated 3-5% of Singaporean voters actually vote this way.¹⁶

Note that your ballot is secret.

See CAPE’s fun illustration of Voter Types >

How can we do elections better in Singapore?

Click on the following mini-pages to explore thematic issues and flaws in our electoral system. Some of these issues contribute to criticisms of Singapore’s elections as “free but not fair”. ¹⁷

Rethinking First-Past-The-Post voting

Rethinking the GRC system

Understanding the PAP Supermajority in Parliament

Electoral Boundaries: Perceptions of Gerrymandering & Malapportionment

What is protest voting? And why do some people do it?

What are forms of “Gutter Politics”?

Mega List of Useful GE Resources

Consolidating educational resources across the internet by other citizens, academics, and groups. Click on the arrows to expand!

Basic Voter Information

Elections Department (ELD) of Singapore: Voter Education resources
Data.gov.sg’s Interactive Map of Constituencies: You can track constituency changes over time.

More GE Explainers

General:

Fair or Foul? Electoral Democracy and Boundaries in Singapore – AcademiaSG: Webinar on Electoral Boundaries with NUS Legal Scholar Assoc. Prof. Kevin YL Tan

Great general resources

AcademiaSG: Extensive, free-to-access essays, analysis, commentaries by academics and scholars writing on Singaporean political and civic issues

Further articles and discussion

Cause-Specific GE Resources & Scorecards

On-Ground Coverage

Party Resources

Released Party Manifestos

Party Telegram Channels

Youth-run, Research-based, Non-partisan

CAPE’s One-Stop Voter Education portal and our resources are created and maintained by our team of Singaporean volunteers. Our community comprises current students, recent graduates, academics, and young Singaporeans across the political spectrum. We are unified by our common desire to strengthen Singapore’s democracy through civic and political literacy. We are non-partisan and independent.

See all our resources and projects

References

Oliver & Ostwald 2018 ↩︎
Oliver & Ostwald 2018 ↩︎
Lee Min Kok, 2016, Straits Times ↩︎
Ilyda Chua 2024 Mothership ↩︎
Morganbesser 2017, p. 210 ↩︎
Barr 2014 ↩︎
Chua, 2017. p. 173 ↩︎
Abdullah 2018, p. 476 and Oliver & Ostwald 2018 ↩︎
Cheang & Choy 2024 ↩︎
Oliver & Ostwald 2018, p. 7 ↩︎
Abdullah 2018, p. 480 ↩︎
https://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/docs/default-source/ips/st_voters-is-a-freak-election-likely_011114.pdf ↩︎
Tan & Grofman 2018, p. 280 ↩︎
Tan & Grofman 2018, p. 283 ↩︎
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/aljunied-voters-will-regret-choosing-wp–mm-lee.html ↩︎
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2023.2191191?src=&journalCode=fdem20 ↩︎
Tan, Netina. “Manipulating electoral laws in Singapore.” Electoral studies 32.4 (2013): 632-643. ↩︎