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The Tension of Weak Ties

Commentary: Relooking the recruitment and renewal of PAP’s leadership

Contextual information (from Wikipedia): The People’s Action Party (abbrev: PAP) is a centre-right political party in Singapore. Having been the country’s ruling party since 1959, it is Singapore’s longest-ruling party. Since the 1959 general elections, the PAP has dominated Singapore’s parliamentary democracy and has been central to the city-state’s rapid political, social, and economic development.

Singapore’s government follows the Westminster parliamentary system of government.

The PAP is moving into its 4th generation of political leaders. This may be a foreign idea to the U.S., which has the White House swap hands between Republicans and Democrats every decade or so, but this is a natural consequence if the ruling party has been the dominant party for a long time. Leadership selection is of paramount for a tiny nation-state, which would ordinarily have no business thriving, or even existing, in this world if not for the quality of its top cadre, the policies they implement, and the hard work of everyday Singaporeans.

With that in mind, some elements of this article are especially interesting in the context of network theory:

 

  1. Emeritus Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong raised the imperative for the People’s Action Party’s (PAP) new generation of leaders to build a “stronger and more inclusive millennial generation team”, and to “try their utmost to bring in potential office-holders from outside the Singapore Armed Forces and public sector to avoid group-think”.
  2. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong reiterated that the “PAP must be close to all segments of society.”
  3. Mr Goh’s call for diversity came for a reason. Every member of the so-called fourth generation PAP leadership has his roots in government.
  4. Finally, looking to Ms Chia as an example, there is no reason why the PAP should not also look deeper at the corps of NMPs* as potential candidates. Introduced in 1990, the intent of the scheme lies in injecting a diversity of views into Parliamentary debate.

*NMPs or Nominated Members of Parliament are Members of the Parliament in Singapore that are not elected, are not affiliated to any political party and do not represent any constituency.

If we think of a political party as a network, we can perhaps infer a few of its properties. The inner circles of the party form a complete graph and there are strong ties between its members who work with each other regularly and share the same political alignment. As with any tightly knit in-group, they are selective in deciding who gets to join this network.

Since the legislative (parliament) and executive (the civil service) work hand-in-hand in order to implement national policies, it is natural that strong ties are formed between these two groups. Strong Triadic Closure points out the obvious: members of the civil service will form ties with members of the legislative (i.e. the PAP), as is expected in any working relationship. This makes it more likely for members of the civil service to form a cluster (as defined in graph theory) with the PAP, and increases the chances of them joining the upper echelons of the party as well, selective as they may be. This explains point 1 above, which points out that many potential office-holders come from the military or the public sector.

The strength of weak ties is also alluded to in point 2 & 3. It is implied that there would be insufficient diversity of political office-holders if they were to have their roots in one of the branches of government. As we know from network theory, the strength of a weak tie lies in the fact that a weak tie is more likely to be a local bridge, and thus connect two groups of individuals with different perspectives, and provide both with new sources of information. This access to new information or, as said in point 2, “[being] close to all segments of society”, is more likely to happen in a weak tie, i.e. the party cannot hope to understand the needs of all segments of society unless it reaches beyond the safe and reliable choices it finds in the military and the public sector.

If we leave the analysis at that, then this piece is trivial. It merely restates what we already know in terms of network theory. So I’d like to explore the limits of network theory (or what we have learnt so far of it) by attempting to answer the question as to why the PAP doesn’t simply strengthen those weak ties and have these members join their team.

It might simply be a matter of not having sufficient opportunity, trust, or incentive to form strong ties with these members, as explained in an earlier paragraph. But if I were to go out on a limb, it might be that strengthening these weak ties might inadvertently weaken the strong ties that already exist within the party. For a party like the PAP to provide strong and consistent leadership in an era of disruption requires a powerful unity within its core group, and a shared sense of what is vital or critical for the country’s continued success. In other words, to join the PAP would require one to have a certain frame of mind, and perhaps this frame of mind is most easily obtained by a stint in the public sector. NMPs who are drawn from “community groups in the fields of arts and letters”, the “environmental movement”, or “young activists” offer access to new sources of information, but by being part of these special-interest groups, they may be unsuitable or simply have a harder time aligning their different perspectives with that of a party’s core group. After all, the type of thinking possessed by an artist is different from that of a member of the public sector. There is also the consideration that forming strong ties with a network may weaken one’s ties with one’s original network, simply by virtue of having to spread time and resources over more nodes. This reduces the individual’s relevance as a source of new information.

Of course, this is just postulation, and there may be weaknesses to the idea. For example, it may be argued that in the first generation of PAP’s leaders, the core group came from a wide array of professions. S. Rajaratnam was a journalist. Dr Toh Chin Chye was an academic. The first Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew was a union lawyer. Dr Goh Keng Swee was from the civil service. It is worth noting, however, that they had strong ties between them even before the formation of the PAP. Lee and Goh had met in Raffles College, and developed their friendship when they were studying in London. Toh and Goh were part of the Malayan Forum in London, an anti-colonial student body that discussed current affairs in Malaya. Lee, Toh, and Goh were already thinking of the independence of Malaya even as students in the U.K. When approached by Lee and Goh, Rajaratnam had written articles supporting the workers’ strikes that attacked the colonial government. The difference between the 1st and 4th generation leaders therefore is that the leaders of the former were friends first, then political allies, i.e. their strong ties came not from them being in the public sector, but from being in various walks of life that happened to converge on the common path that was Singapore’s independence.

That members of the PAP have to have a certain “cut of mind” thus remains a reasonable claim, as is the idea that to reinforce those weak ties and invite those from significantly different networks in Singapore society to join the party can thus possibly weaken the strong ties within the core group. Yet to not do so would spell doom for Singapore if it ensued in only groupthink and a less robust, innovative government – a government that fails to be “close to all segments of society”. Therein lies the tension of weak ties.

 

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