Some people have expressed their fears of multi-cornered fights in the upcoming GE (they are mostly either opposition supporters or people who want the PAP to be in government but wish to see more opposition voices in Parliament). I do not share their fears and have more faith in Singaporeans in this regard: not because i believe that all Singaporeans are politically astute in all aspects, but because there have been evidence to suggest that Singaporeans have learnt the potential effects of multi-cornered fights.
In the 2011 Presidential Election, Singaporeans were divided between three candidates: eventually, Dr Tony Tan won the election with the tiniest of margins. A substantial amount of people who voted for Tan Jee Say (25%) must have regretted their choice, as had they casted their votes for Dr Tan Cheng Bock (who would be the natural next option: one cannot imagine a person who voted for TJS preferring Tony Tan over TCB), TCB would have been the president.
Fast forward to 2013: Punggol East by-election. There were two things that did not receive sufficient attention in the aftermath of the sensational electoral outcome: 1) the disastrous performances of Desmond Lim and Kenneth Jeyaretnam (Desmond’s one is particularly important), and 2) SDP was completely ignored by WP when the former attempted to devise creative plans to mount a ‘unified’opposition to PAP.
In the 2011 GE, Desmond contested the Punggol East constituency against PAP and WP candidates. He received 4.45% of the votes. In 2013, he attained just 0.57% of the vote share. While both results were atrocious, the second one was particularly so. I argue that Singaporeans had learnt from the Presidential Elections that every vote truly mattered in a multi-cornered contest, and hence were less likely to waste their votes on candidates who had no serious chance of winning (in the first place, a significant portion of the 4.45% he received in 2011 could have been purely out of sympathy, and when the going gets tough, there really is less room for sympathy or other considerations). The fact that SDP withdrew very early on, suggests that its leaders probably believed this from the start too.
In Political Science literature, the above phenomenon is known as the ‘psychological effect’ in voting, and was made popular by Duverger. I believe we have seen the psychological effect occurring in Singapore, and that we will see more of it if there are more multi-cornered fights.
Hence, I contend that the following will be likely to happen:
In the constituencies that WP is contesting, the other opposition parties who decide to contest will not get their deposits back. In fact, I do not expect them to get more than 3% of the votes. This is regardless of which are the other parties.
In the constituencies that WP is not contesting but there are multi-cornered contests, it depends on which parties are contesting. If SDP and NSP contest, then maybe the votes would be significantly split: this is because both are parties of similar stature, and opposition supporters may be divided as to which would be the party that would get more votes.
In the constituencies that WP is not contesting, and only either SDP or NSP is contesting with the other smaller parties, one can expect the other parties to not get their deposits back.
So perhaps the opposition parties should take heed from lessons of the 2011 Presidential Elections and 2013 Punggol-East By-Election: be prepared to lose your money in the multi-cornered fights, because vote-splitting between the opposition parties will be rare.
In any case, Singaporeans should not be overly-worried about having more parties in electoral contests: such a situation is ultimately good in enhancing democracy.
