People's Action Party

The People's Action Party (PAP) is a major conservative^[12][13] political party in Singapore and is the governing contemporary political party represented in the Parliament of Singapore, followed by the opposition Workers' Party (WP).^[14][15]

The PAP was established in 1954 as a conventional centre-left party. Following its initial electoral success in 1959, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew sought to reposition the party ideologically toward the centre. In pursuit of this objective, he expelled the party's leftist faction in 1961, during the period of Singapore's merger with Malaysia. Over the course of the 1960s and since then, the PAP continued its ideological shift towards the centre-right.^[16] After Singapore's separation from Malaysia and subsequent independence in 1965, the majority of opposition parties, excluding the WP, boycotted the 1968 general election. Consequently, the PAP secured all parliamentary seats in that election. In the ensuing decades, the PAP consolidated its political dominance through successive electoral victories. It consistently formed the executive branch of government and exerted substantial influence over key national institutions, including the country's sole trade union, the National Trade Union Congress (NTUC), which is affiliated with the party, as well as the civil service.^[17]

Between 1965 and 1981, the PAP was the sole political party represented in Parliament. This period of exclusive representation ended with the party's first electoral defeat in a 1981 by-election in the Anson Constituency, where the WP secured the seat. Despite this setback, the PAP has retained its political dominance. In every subsequent general election, the party consistently garnered over 60 percent of the popular vote and secured more than 80 percent of parliamentary seats, achieving landslide victories on each occasion. Having governed continuously for 66 years, the PAP remains the dominant political force in Singapore, effectively operating within the framework of a de facto one-party state. It has maintained an unbroken two-thirds parliamentary supermajority enabling it to amend the Constitution at will. As of 2025, the PAP is the longest-serving uninterrupted ruling party among contemporary multi-party parliamentary democracies and holds the second-longest tenure of any governing party in modern history, surpassed solely by Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed from 1929 to 2000.^[18]

Positioned on the centre-right of Singapore's political spectrum, the PAP espouses a combination of social conservatism and economic liberalism. The party generally advocates free-market principles, favouring policies such as low taxation, the absence of tariffs, limited government expenditure relative to gross domestic product (GDP), minimal economic regulation and the promotion of economic freedom.^[19] Nonetheless, the PAP occasionally engages in strategic state intervention, reflecting elements of welfarism. A distinctive feature of its economic approach is the support for the development and expansion of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), locally referred to as government-linked corporations (GLCs). These entities were initially established in response to the economic disruptions caused by the British military withdrawal from Singapore in 1971.^[20] GLCs played a central role in driving export-oriented industrialisation, fostering economic development and generating employment across key sectors of the economy. On social matters, the PAP endorses communitarian values and civic nationalism. A cornerstone of its social policy is the promotion of national cohesion through the integration of the country's major ethnic groups into a unified Singaporean identity.^[21]

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