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Compared to the general election of 2006, the electorate in 2011 appears to be more mature, in that a larger number of them are swing voters. They are less easily pigeonholed into pro-People’s Action Party or pro-opposition camps.
Even so, among young adults, the tertiary-educated and those in upper-middle-class households, the pro-opposition camp is about twice as large as the pro-PAP camp.
These findings came from a survey of about 2,000 eligible voters conducted by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) in the fortnight after Polling Day.
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Both Chua and IPS Deputy Director Arun Mahizhnan thought we shouldn’t lose the historical perspective. Singapore had a vibrant political culture fifty years ago. We are not so much moving to a new normal, but re-normalising after a long period of the abnormal. We even “accepted that abnormality to be the only way things should be,” Chua observed.
From MIT’s Technology Review:
In practice, there are numerous examples of democratic systems that are rife with corruption or paralysed by disagreement. Even in benign parliaments, it is often an open question as to whether the work they do really benefits the majority of people.
Today, Alessandro Pluchino and amici at the Universitá di Catania in Italy say there is a better way. They have modelled the behaviour of a two-party parliament and examined how it changes as randomly selected independent legislators are introduced into the system. Their counterintuitive conclusion is that randomly selected legislators always improves the performance of parliament and that it is possible to determine the optimal number of independents at which a parliament works best.
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The researchers wanted to know from a mathematical perspective, if adding a random distribution of ‘politicians’ would increase the number of acts that got passed — and if those acts were socially beneficial. So, the “measure of performance is the number of acts passed multiplied by their average social benefit.” They expected to see the number of socially-beneficial acts passed increase as more ‘random politicians’ were added to the mix. And sure enough:
“They ran their model for various distributions of power in the two party system and found that in every case, adding random legislators improves the performance of parliament.”
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if it was a civic duty to act as legislator, if you were randomly selected to do so (like a draft for governance) — and left office after a term without having to cater to corporate interests to drum up campaign finances for reelection. It would give us a way to sidestep the tightening grip that corporations and the wealthy have on our politics. Sure, there would be some lazy, incompetent people selected who would act in their own self-interest or against the societal good. But as Pluchino’s work shows, they’re offset by smarter ones, willing to work for the good of society.
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Given the high usage of new/social media, these femininities are constructed, enframed, replicated, memeified and heartily consumed in a matter of seconds, immortalising the projections of certain female politicians/political candidates, even if these projections may not fully and accurately represent the individuals themselves.
All these constructions are made in a domain governed by (general) people's paradigmatic demands and insistence on a certain set of behaviours and performativities they believe to be commonly associated with political discourse - our expectations are gendered, and we have a taste for desirable femininities.
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female politicians tend to receive more attention on their looks - almost indicative of the belief that they do not bring to the table the same quality of input as their male colleagues do.
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Put in decent looks, youth and (desirable) female-ness into the political arena, you get the shallowly sexist construction that is the Tin Pei Ling-Nicole Seah diametric.
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Are all votes created equal? Not according to Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Brown. In The Ethics of Voting, he asks the obvious-yet-unutterable question at the heart of American politics: what are all those uninformed, indifferent, lazy, and stupid people doing in the voting booth?
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To vote well, Brennan argues, you actually need to be thinking at a very high level. It's not enough to know which policies different candidates support. You also need to have "epistemically justified" opinions about those policies -- which, in many cases, means drawing on "social-scientific background knowledge." That knowledge is hard to acquire, which is why reasonable people can disagree about their votes while also voting well; the point is that they've done their due diligence and taken voting seriously.
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Many voters, meanwhile, as Brennan sees it, have little interest in doing the hard work of voting. They vote instinctively, irrationally, or for narrowly imagined, purely self-interested reasons. These voters, Brennan says, are actually doing something ethically wrong when they vote this way. It's obvious, of course, that some voters vote badly: in the last Presidential election, eight percent of New Jersey voters claimed that Barack Obama was the anti-Christ. Clearly -- unlike more-informed Republicans who voted against Obama -- they went about voting in the wrong way. It's not just crazy people who vote badly, though. "Many politically active citizens," Brennan points out, "try to make the world better and vote with the best of intentions" -- but, "although they are politically engaged, they are nonetheless often ignorant of or misinformed about the relevant facts, or, worse, are simply irrational." These voters, Brennan writes, also "pollute democracy with their votes." They would be doing more good if they didn't vote at all.
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Why should we care how many people vote? The answer is that democracy, our ability to chose who governs and sets policy is of vital importance to skeptics and free thinkers. Health policy, like whether or not alternative medicine is integrated into our health care or if naturopaths are able to prescribe medicine, is decided by our elected officials. If we don’t elect politicians who understand the importance of these issues, we could seriously jeopardize public health.
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If we elect politicians who believe that global warming is a conspiracy, we’re unlikely to see any attempt to safe guard the environment. Likewise, if we elect someone who believes in creationism over evolution, what can we expect to happen to funding for sound, evidence-based, science?
Democracy is also vital in that if we elect politicians who believe in free inquiry, free speech and free expression, we can safeguard our society from fear mongering, intolerance, and instability.
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Some would say that voter apathy is the reason we see such small voter turnout numbers. The apathy in this case means that a large majority of the electorate simply don’t care who gets elected. The implication is that voters simply don’t care enough to follow through with voting. For example, they’re tired after work and don’t want to go down to a polling station.
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he has decided to vote for the PAP. Why? Because he does not believe his vote is secret and his daughter attends a PAP school and is worried that she will be kicked out if he votes for the opposition.
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he related his conversations with the various people he has met. You see, in his job, he goes from home to home servicing air-cons and being a young man with a pleasant disposition, he strikes up conversations easily. This is what he said to me. He said that almost everyone in private homes have indicated that they will vote for the opposition while almost everyone in HDB will vote for the PAP.
I was surprised. He was surprised I was surprised. He raised two points. HDB dwellers need the PAP to fix stuff. They equate PAP with HDB. Secondly, their lives are already so difficult that if they vote against the PAP (note, not for the opposition but against the PAP), their lives will be made all the more difficult. They too, do not believe their vote is secret. He even gave me an anecdotal example of someone who voted against the PAP and he was denied certain privileges.
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In SMCs, results can swing dramatically from the national percentage: the best performing Opposition MPs in each GE have scored 25 to 30 points better than the national average. In GRCs, however, even the closest contests don’t deviate much from the national numbers. I suppose this would be obvious to mathematicians: the bigger the sample size, the more it would resemble the larger population. Thus, the Opposition’s star teams have done just 2 to 12 points better than the national percentage – usually around 10 points better.
If this pattern persists in this GE, the implications are clear. In order for the Opposition to win a GRC, the PAP’s national vote share will probably have to dip below 60 percent (from 67 percent in 2006). If the Opposition averages 40+ percent nationally, there is a realistic chance of a strong Opposition team doing 10 points better, to secure more than 50 percent of the votes and making history.
MARUAH is conducting an election watch project. Part of this project includes monitoring the election coverage by the mainstream media, specifically the Straits Times, TODAY and The New Paper. (We are unable to cover the other languages and other media, e.g. TV and radio, because of resource constraints.)
Our findings on Day 4 are set out below. You can also download all of the findings as a PDF file.
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The Economist summarizes some new research by Kimberly Nalder, of Cal State Sacramento, who quizzed people about Prop 13, a voter initiative that applies a tax cap to all property, both residential and commercial
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Ms Nalder found that the best-educated (those with more than a master’s degree) were most likely to answer incorrectly that Proposition 13 applies only to residential property. Those with the least education (high-school dropouts) were most likely to get it right. Similarly, those who were already of voting age when Proposition 13 passed were most likely to answer incorrectly and the youngest correctly. The same pattern held for income, with wealthier respondents being more likely to be misinformed. Perhaps most intriguingly, the largest group among homeowners (who directly benefit from Proposition 13) were misinformed, whereas the largest group of renters (who do not benefit) answered correctly.
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Parties would be unwise to assume that defamation law, in particular, will be any less relevant in Campaign 2011. The government does not accept that the cut and thrust of campaigning is an excuse for politicians to sully one another’s reputations with allegations that they can’t prove in court.
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The liberalisation of online campaigning rules raises intriguing questions about the upcoming polls. At one level, the move merely acknowledges the new realities
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But, so much more space is being opened up for legitimate use that one is bound to ask:
What’s the catch?
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Criticalist wrote in a comment to Effect on election advertising amendments on non-party netizens:
I can’t help but wonder why the rules have been relaxed, specifically what advantages would accrue the dominant political party? In the past, alternative media was largely the domain of opposition parties and discourse critical of the government, hence the need to impose restrictions on them.
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My default mode is to assume that the liberalisation — incomplete though it is — is designed to serve the ruling People’s Action Party’s (PAP) interest, and that it is not altruistic.
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what subconscious inclinations make us vote the way we do? Here are some theories about the most common biases — coming soon to a voting booth near you!
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1) Stick-it-to-the-Man Bias. People mistakenly believe that punishing “the man” (big corporations, oil companies, the extremely rich) will have little or no consequence for the rest of us
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2) Action Bias. We want to fix things when they go wrong, so in troubled times we vote for a change, regardless of whether the change will bring any good.
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