ABSTRACT
Domestic and international events in the 1990s, culminating in the 1997 Asian financial crisis, pushed all the capitalist countries in Southeast Asia into the process of political democratization. The exception is Singapore, where the hegemonic People’s Action Party (PAP) still constitutes the single-party dominant government. Through a combination of overtly repressive measures, particularly in the early years of its ascendancy to power, and the ability to forge an ideological hegemony in terms of the pragmatics of economic development as nation-building, the PAP has never been seriously challenged since it took power in 1968.
