Singapore may be analyzed to be a bit more democratic now, but it’s not much, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Democracy Index.
The latest rankings show that Singapore’s overall score went up from 6.03 last year to 6.14 points out of 10 this year, moving one spot up to 74th place in the world. Despite all that, Singapore still remains in the category of ‘flawed democracy’.
Still, it’s a helluva lot better than how Singapore scored back in 2006, when the first edition of the Democracy Index was first published. Back then, Singapore scored a measly 5.89 out of 10, and was labelled a ‘hybrid regime’. It was only last year that the country improve its reputation to a ‘flawed democracy.
The index measures the democratic level of each country based on categories such as government function, electoral process, civil liberties and more. Singapore may have scored well for the functioning of government (7.50) but not so good for electoral process and pluralism (4.33) and political participation (5.56).
Surprisingly for a country who’s so proud to be Southeast Asia’s success story, Singapore ranks lower than the regional likes of Indonesia (49th), the Philippines (54th), and Malaysia (68th) on the democracy scale. Meanwhile the top three countries on the list are held by Scandinavians — Norway, Iceland and Sweden.
