Election Resources: Part 2 (Candidates)
It’s Nomination Day! Candidates contesting in the General Election will file their papers today and then the campaign season will start for real. Until then, the local news is a drip feed of candidate announcements — new faces, retirements and “redeployments”. It feels like a sports draft!
What do Members of Parliament do?
MPs represent constituents’ interests both (hyper)locally and nationally. They run the Town Council and attend to residents’ concerns during Meet The People Sessions. They also debate legislation and pass laws in Parliament. You should, technically, be able to discuss both the rubbish collection schedule in your estate and your views on Singapore’s foreign policy with your MP.
This comic strip by Anngee Neo is a great primer on what MPs and what the two supplementary schemes (Nominated Members of Parliament and Non-Constituency Members of Parliament) do.
What has my Member of Parliament done?
The Community for Advocacy and Political Education (CAPE) puts out a Parliament Tracker every month. It includes a tally of the number of Parliamentary Questions each MP asks.
CAPE will be releasing their full report on Singapore’s 14th Parliament (2020–2025) this Sunday. There’s an online event scheduled for Monday, April 28 at 8 PM where former NMP Anthea Ong and academics Walid Abdullah and Elvin Ong will discuss the report’s key findings. You can register for the event here.
The Straits Times has also published a report on this past Parliament that includes useful statistics on MPs’ levels of participation.
Beyond knowing how often your MP spoke up, it’s important to know what they said.
Reports of Parliamentary Sittings are public information. You can access the entire Hansard here.
I read the Hansard a lot for my day job and it’s been useful for understanding what individual MPs care about. You won’t believe how many times the PAP’s MVP Louis Ng has complained raised concerns about smoking!
The summary above comes from Pair Search, the search engine built by Open Government Products. Pair Search is great if you need to look up specific topics (like maternity leave or the foreign manpower quota) and is generally easier to use than the official Hansard site. You can also filter results by MP — though, in my experience, this function doesn’t always work. It uses an AI language model to generate its summaries but there is truly no replacement for reading the reports yourself. They’re full of gems. :)
If you’d like to ownself assess your MP, Bertha Henson and Cheyenne Yee have produced a Report Card Template with prompts like “Got do walkabouts or block visits to get to know you?” for you to reflect on.
Who are the new candidates?
It is harder to judge the new faces, of whom there are a ton this election. They don’t have track records as Parliamentarians so you have to get to know them through their CVs, what people who claim to know them say on social media, and their hobbies(?).
The (more organised) parties have posted introductions for their new candidates on social media.
The media is also covering news about new candidates as they’re announced. The Straits Times has published two stories on the new PAP and WP candidates respectively. New candidates are also making appearances on podcasts like Yah Lah BUT, Teh Tarik with Walid, and some others not worth mentioning.
These introductions are useful to understand what an individual might speak on if elected to Parliament.
The Mynah team really liked this speech from Workers’ Party newcomer Harpreet Singh.
To really unite our people, we must embrace a fairer politics. That must mean a few things. … It must mean that we start treating our arts community, civil society, and our critics with respect, not suspicion. We are all pro-Singapore and so let’s not ever, in Parliament, mangle the poetry of one our most beloved poets and suggest disloyalty on his part. Let’s not ever withdraw arts funding from one of our best artists because his cartoons paint a different political narrative from the national one. And let’s not also leave our citizens with the distinct impression that some of our brightest minds in this country are denied tenure because they have dared to speak truth to power. These things breed resentment and, as a small country, we can’t afford that.
(I’ve added links to Harpreet’s speech that provide more information about the three examples he raised.)
As a publication, and an independent one, we want more free expression, free speech, and the freedom to publish. It is encouraging that we might get an MP willing to bring the “OB Markers” conversation to Parliament.
How to vote?
With Singapore’s unique Group Representation Constituency (GRC) system, whether or not a candidate is elected does not always have a direct link to their vote share. GRCs are a package deal: voters decide on entire teams rather than individual candidates. That’s why a party’s GRC slate might be described as an “A-team” or a “suicide squad”. It’s also why the GRC system has been criticised as one that allows new or previously unsuccessful candidates to gain parliamentary seats by being “parachuted in” or by riding on the “coat tails” of more popular team members.
For some voters, as suggested by independent journalist Kirsten Han, it’s “much less about weighing the merits of opposing candidates than about deciding on trade-offs between teams”.
Others might vote based on their personal experiences with a candidate, a candidate’s stance on the topics most important to them, or their campaign promises.
Academia SG’s webinar Keeping Score in an Age of Push-Button Politics discusses some of these reasons and what voters should consider when making their choice. I watched the full 100 minute video and found it really useful. If you can’t spare the time though, sociologist Teo You Yenn summarises the discussion in this video.
If you see candidates on their walkabouts, consider asking one of the questions You Yenn lists in the video:
What are the challenges you see in Singapore society?
How will you figure out how to represent Singaporeans from diverse backgrounds?
How do you intend to prepare for your role as MP? (for new candidates)
or
What roles have you played in shaping the substance of key pieces of legislation? (for incumbents)
Finally, SG Climate Rally and CAPE are holding an online voter education workshop, Vote For What Sia?, this Saturday at 2 PM. They will cover topics like Singapore’s electoral process and how to get involved during this campaign period. Register for the Zoom session here.
The Road to Polling Day
We’ll send out one last newsletter next week with a focus on the parties’ platforms. It’s going to be a sprint to May 3! The Mynah team is looking forward to finally attending political rallies, please say hello if you spot us at one!