New Naratif
New Naratif empowers Southeast Asians by giving them the information and tools to be fully engaged and participatory citizens.
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What do our Singaporean readers really think about the current state of Singapore and the most important issues facing the country? In stage 1 of The Citizens’ Agenda, we asked them to answer the following question:
In your opinion, what issues do you consider important to Singapore? What do you think the candidates should be talking about as they compete for your votes in the upcoming election?
1,232 people responded. Unlike in 2019, where the responses were entirely online through New Naratif’s survey portal, this time we worked with a survey company, Vase.ai, to ensure that we surveyed a statistically representative sample of Singaporeans. The responses were extremely diverse, intelligent, and passionate. If you’d like to see the (anonymised) raw data, here it is (warning: some people used language that may be considered offensive).
As in 2019, we read through all 1,232 responses and then grouped all the responses into 23 broad issues. People brought up many different topics, from job security to environmental issues. Take a look at the responses below—and then go respond to Stage 2 and tell us which five issues are the most important issues facing Singapore! It’s also available in Malay, Chinese, and Tamil.
A note on our survey company: Vase.ai is a survey platform that has 3.6 million people across Southeast Asia in its panel. Through its platform, it aims to provide surveys as an automated service, thus making it easy and affordable to run statistically-accurate surveys across the region in different countries. However, this automation also involves constraints and trade-offs, and one trade-off is that we have to conform to its pre-defined panel demography. This includes only two genders (male and female), the CMIO racial categorisation, and a geographic location based on Singapore’s planning areas rather than constituency or other commonly-used geographic boundaries. In New Naratif’s own public survey, we sought to be more inclusive, but the majority of the data (1,215 respondents) comes from Vase.ai and the results are accordingly limited.
For brevity in stage 2, we summarised each issue in under 280 characters. Each issue includes examples of the questions and concerns that people raised. Here they are, in alphabetical order:
Interestingly, respondents ignored many issues identified by the current PAP government as urgent:
Longest response: One response consisted of 1776 words, longer than many journalism articles on New Naratif and nearly 300 words more than the longest answer from 2019 (1497 words)! It covered only four issues: “Recovery from COVID-19”; “Freedom of speech, expression, assembly, and the press”; “Election reform”; and “Cost of Living”. The vast majority of the answer was devoted to the second issue, freedom of speech, expression, assembly, and the press;
Honourable mention goes to the person who simply cut and pasted the entirety of our previous Citizens’ Agenda research from 2019 into their answer. Did they simply google “most important issues facing Singapore” and then cut and paste our article? Or did they feel that nothing has changed since 2019?
Shortest response: Unlike in 2019, no one submitted “jobs”, but many people submitted essentially the same thing: “Money”, “Inflation”, “Employment”, “Cost of Living”. Technically, however, the shortest answer goes to the person who wrote “LGBT”, presumably meaning discrimination against sexual orientation and identity.
Most amusing, exasperating, and yet inadvertently revealing response: “I’m not supposed to talk about anything political related in Singapore (sic), not allowed as am not a citizen of Singapore.” It’s a sign of how internalised this belief that non-citizens are not allowed to comment on Singapore politics is that this person has responded this way. The truth is, of course, that the PAP government is more than happy for foreigners to comment on and interfere in Singapore politics—as long as they agree with the PAP.
We’re not going to tell you which were the most popular responses, as we don’t want to influence your response in Stage 2, but here is a word cloud:
Finally, a demographic breakdown of the 1,215 respondents on Vase.ai. Percentages are rounded to the nearest percentage point, and so the percentages may not add up to 100%:
Location:
Now that you’ve seen the breakdown, go respond to Stage 2 and tell us which five issues are the most important issues facing Singapore! It’s also available in Malay, Chinese, and Tamil. Your voice matters to shape the future of your country. Spread the word and invite your community to participate.
Your email address will not be published.
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New Naratif empowers Southeast Asians by giving them the information and tools to be fully engaged and participatory citizens. Support us in building the People Power of Southeast Asia by participating in our movement.
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