ABSTRACT
The development experience of Singapore has been the subject of extensive commentary in scholarly, political, and policy analytic contexts, and such work has adopted a variety of intellectual approaches. Substantively, historical institutionalism seeks to unpack the creative social dialectic of structures and agents, and these exchanges are taken to inform the construction and reconstruction of social institutions. The geographical island of Singapore has been lodged within a number of wider structures of power: economic, financial, security and cultural. Scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences have developed a number of approaches to the analysis of the political life of communities. Vivien Lowndes and Mark Roberts track the development of institutional analysis, first amongst economists, then sociologists and finally political analysts. The concern for change in social relationships, cast in terms of path dependency, critical junctures, equilibrium, and the like, calls attention to the exchange between agents and structures.
