People's Action Party Government Research Articles

Democratic backsliding in illiberal Singapore

Singapore is a well-known illiberal democracy, ruled by one party, the People's Action Party (PAP), uninterruptedly since 1959. The rise of disinformation, the leadership succession crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have posed challenges to the ruling party's technocratic, ‘soft-authoritarian’ governance style. Is it business as usual in Singapore? Or has its democracy backslid like its regional neighbours? Drawing on an established index of accountability and V-Dem's democratic indicators, our study investigates whether democratic institutions in hybrid regimes such as Singapore have changed. We find that mechanisms of diagonal accountability related to media and civil society have declined. Vertical and horizontal accountability remains weak as expected in a hybrid regime such as Singapore. The PAP government has returned to relying on the law as a ‘fist in velvet glove’ to muzzle dissent and constrain information that may last post pandemic.

Legislating the Women’s “Bill of Rights”: Examining Singapore’s Civil Society Through the Origins of the Women’s Charter (1961)

Sixty years after its enactment, the Women’s Charter remains lauded as a landmark piece of legislation in Singapore. Through its provisions, this legislative Act affirmed the rights of women, protected vulnerable women and girls, outlined the rights and responsibilities of married persons, and mandated that all non-Muslim marriages were henceforth to be monogamous. This article examines the historical developments that led to the introduction of this unprecedented “women’s Bill of Rights” by the PAP (People’s Action Party) government in 1961. Whilst extant literature credits its origins to the lobbying efforts of the Singapore’s Council of Women formed in 1952, this article argues for the need to adopt a broader contextual perspective to better account for the development of this “revolutionary” Bill between 1952 and 1961. Furthermore, earlier attempts at marriage reform, such as the 1950 Age of Marriage Bill spearheaded by the Singapore Progressive Party’s John Laycock, have curiously been overlooked in the larger narrative of women’s rights and social reform in Singapore. This article thus seeks to remedy this gap in our knowledge and to provide a fuller understanding of Singapore’s civil society in the post-war era, leading up to the introduction of the Women’s Charter.

Youth activism, state-contained participation and democratic legitimacy in Singapore

PurposeThis research is concerned with youth activism in Singapore historically and the importance of legitimacy for understanding the further development of youth activism and Singapore’s democratization process. It takes into account issues pertaining to good governance, economic performance and democratic participation (legitimacy). The paper aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approachThe research adopts a historical approach, qualitative in nature with some quantitative analysis based on documentary research, press reports and content analysis.FindingsHistorically youth activism was vibrant and dynamic in the fight for independence and against inequality and injustice during the colonial era in Singapore. Under Lee Kuan Yew’s rule, the scope and boundary of democratic participation (legitimacy) were delimited and controlled by the state. State-contained or controlled participation has replaced contentious politics. In the Singapore General Election in 2011, the younger generation of Singapore electorate, who are better educated and well-travelled, however, proved themselves to be rational and pragmatic when they exercised their rights to reject polices detrimental to their socio-economic well-beings as well as to the inclusiveness of society. The People’s Action Party (PAP) had the lowest vote share (60 per cent) in history. Since then the PAP government had stepped up its efforts in improving welfare gains of the citizens as well as managing public discontents with more effective policies. The PAP victory in the Singapore election (GE 2015), however, showed that among other reasons, welfare gains and good governance helped in salvaging the electoral legitimacy vis-à-vis the political legitimacy of the PAP government. However, the PAP government’s continual harsh treatment of critics, young and old, means that to achieve democratic legitimacy, it has to break through the shackles of authoritarian leadership style and elite governance, which have led to the regime’s failure to face up to the reality of an emerging civic participatory culture in the Singapore contexts.Originality/valueLegitimacy is an important concept. To date there is no systematic application of this concept to the study of Singapore electoral politics. This paper employs Bruce Gilley’s determinants of legitimacy – democratic legitimacy, welfare gains and good governance – to explicate the basis of the PAP’s regime legitimacy, the contradictions inherent in state-contained participation and political representation that delimited and undermined the nature, scope and boundary of democratic legitimacy.

No Room to Swing a Cat? Animal Treatment and Urban Space in Singapore

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)IntroductionSingapore, the Garden City, has undergone a massive program of urban reform, renewal, and resettlement since independence in 1965. The government of the People's Action Party, which has enjoyed uninterrupted rule, dispersed the population of the overcrowded central-town district to peripheral towns, which were built on land appropriated from old village communities. Through education, land reclamation, military conscription, and public housing, the government created a disciplined industrial workforce (now housed in flats built by the Housing Development Board, or HDB, and linked to factories and offices via highways) along Fordist lines, thus engineering tremendous changes in the human landscape of Singapore (Barr and Skrbis 2008; Chua 1997; Dobbs 2003; Loh 2007; Wee 2007). This massive control over space defined the postcolonial history of Singapore, whose modernity depended as much on facilitating motion as on preventing it (Netz 2004, xii).Although historians have delineated the relationship between authoritarian rule, economic development, and social engineering in Singapore, they have been slow in integrating the work of geographers, who have addressed how landscapes, both material and immaterial, serve as representations and social channels that foster and maintain the state ideologies of human progress and nation building. The government redeveloped the city center-now marked by skyscrapers and the reconstructed racial enclaves of Chinatown, Kampong Glam, and Little India-to showcase Singapore's global connectedness and historical legacies. It developed Marina Promenade and the banks of the Singapore River into a tourist attraction and up-market residential zone that appealed to expatriate executives and foreign visitors. It also created new art spaces such as the Esplanade (home to Theatres on the Bay) and renovated colonial landmarks and dilapidated shophouses to present Singapore as a vibrant arts and hub worthy of admiration at home and abroad (Kong and Yeoh 2003; Chang et al. 2013; Ho et al. 2014).In recent years, historians began to recognize the impact of the natural environment, and attempts to reconfigure it, on the economic, political, and social history of Singapore. They have established that the British colonial authorities and the postcolonial People's Action Party government were interested not only in demolishing outdated structures and flattening the landscape but also in conserving heritage and preserving monuments and parks (including the Botanical Gardens, a new addition to UNESCO's heritage sites as a cultural landscape) to promote scientific research, urban redevelopment, and the construction of a modern national identity (Barnard 2014; Blackburn and Tan 2015). Educated in English-language universities, Singapore's leaders understood that modernization and national success emerged from urban industrial growth, as in the American and European historical experiences. To maintain economic and political legitimacy, they would need to succeed by these terms (Kwak 2008, 87-88).Nevertheless, historians studying Singapore's past have not picked up on animal geographies, which not only inquire into relationships between nature and society and how nature shapes human practices, but also define animals as central agents in the constitution of space and place, and all that entails (Wolch and Emel 1998, xiii). The of geography is unleashed when space constitutes, constrains, and mediates social relations. As Lily Kong and Brenda S. A. Yeoh elaborate, the power relations that define and contest the specificities of the Singaporean nation are negotiated through elements of the landscape, including the landscapes and practices of everyday life (2003, 15). Specialists on Southeast Asia have conducted a fair amount of research on animal-welfare activism and the discursive and practical uses of animals in both colo- nial and postcolonial contexts. …

Popular Nationalism in the Wake of the 2011 National Elections in Singapore

AbstractThis article is about the contestation of two different forms of nationalism in Singapore during and after two elections in 2011. Manufactured nationalism is top-down, state-defined and economically driven, concerned mainly about accumulation of national wealth through globalization that would eventually ‘trickle down’ to the masses. This view is promoted by the ruling People's Action Party (PAP). The PAP projects Singapore as a state born out of the party's triumph over colonialism, racial violence, and communist insurgency. Popular nationalism, on the other hand, is bottom-up and people driven, concerned about local issues concerning national identity, social cohesion, and an appreciation (or at least an understanding) of local heritage. Proponents of popular nationalism emphasize a common beginning (birth of independent Singapore on 9 August 1965), shared historical memories (local heritage), several elements of a common culture (such as the use of Singlish), and an association with a specific ‘homeland’ (born and raised in Singapore and, for males, the completion of conscription). They view Singapore as a nation-state with a unique and evolving identity destabilized by a liberal immigration policy. The elections generated considerable attention due to the gains by the opposition parties and the public airing of frustrations against the PAP government. These frustrations are strongly driven by the influx of new migrants, especially those classified as ‘foreign talent’ by the PAP government. In this article, I argue that popular nationalism has emerged in twenty-first century Singapore and examine the debates over the future of Singapore during and after the elections.

Reclaiming Singapore's ‘Growth with Equity’ Social Compact

AbstractSingapore's long-serving People's Action Party (PAP) government suffered from a major electoral setback in the 2011 general election and subsequent by-elections. The high-growth population policy, underpinned by the influx of migrants and foreign workers, has strongly fuelled the groundswell of public discontent and is commonly perceived to have contributed to widening income disparities, wage stagnation, and cost of living pressures. This article attempts to make sense of the PAP leadership's dogged commitment to the high-growth population policy despite the electoral backlashes and policy criticisms by prominent public intellectuals and others closely connected to the PAP establishment. It considers Singapore's high-growth population policy and widening income disparity within the context of the authoritarian developmental state's shift away from the ‘growth with equity’ social compact. The article also examines the impact of widening income inequality and other policy lapses on the legitimacy of the PAP government as the clamor for a renewed social compact based on ‘growth with equity’ gathers momentum in the repoliticized polity.

Curbing police corruption in Singapore: lessons for other Asian countries

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explain why Singapore has succeeded in curbing the problem of police corruption and to identify the six lessons which other Asian countries can learn from Singapore's experience.Design/methodology/approach– The paper analyzes the causes of police corruption in Singapore during the British colonial period and describes the measures adopted by the People's Action Party government after assuming office in June 1959 to curb police corruption. The effectiveness of these measures is assessed by referring to Singapore's perceived extent of corruption according to three international indicators and the reported cases of police corruption from 1965 to 2011.Findings– The Singapore Police Force has succeeded in minimizing police corruption by improving salaries and working conditions, cooperating with the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau, enhancing its recruitment and selection procedures, providing training and values education for its members, and adopting administrative measures to reduce the opportunities for corruption. Other Asian countries afflicted with rampant police corruption can learn six lessons from Singapore's success.Originality/value– This paper will be of interest to those policy makers, scholars, and anti-corruption practitioners, who are interested in learning how Singapore has succeeded in curbing police corruption.

Navigating Between Limits: The Future of Public Housing in Singapore

The People's Action Party government of Singapore, which has been in power without discontinuity since 1959, is committed to a national housing program with universal provision of 99-year leasehold homeownership for all its citizens. Since 1961 to 2013, the Housing and Development Board, the public housing authority, has built more than one million high-rise housing units, accommodating approximately 90 per cent of the citizens and permanent residents, of which more than 85 per cent of the resident households are homeowners. This close to universal provision system has generated a set of perennial competing demands. Among them are (i) in view of the absence of a national pension scheme, the need to enable homeowners to monetize their public housing property to finance the retirement years, (ii) in order to facilitate retirement funding, public housing flats must be allowed to increase in asset values, to keep up with inflation and rising costs of living and (iii) new subsidized flats must be kept affordable for new entrants into the housing market. The management of these competing demands requires constant monitoring and intervention by the state in order to maintain a balance and sustainable system.

Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore. By Jothie Rajah. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012. 352 pp. $29.99 paper.

Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore. By Jothie Rajah. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012. 352 pp. $29.99 paper.Despite its status as one of the most dynamic global economies that is buttressed by a sizeable educated middle class, Singapore has remained a one-party-dominant authoritarian state governed by the People's Action Party (PAP) since 1959. The city-state's authoritarian longevity stands in stark contrast to other comparable developmental states in East Asia, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, whose democratic trajectories have conformed to the modernization theory of political development. Not surprisingly, the city-state has become a popular destination for senior state functionaries from authoritarian regimes in China, Vietnam, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe eager to emulate the institutional and ideational components of the Singaporean political and economic model.Instructively, many critical scholarly works that have interrogated the Singapore governance model have been written and published beyond its borders. In this mold, Jothie Rajah's Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore adds to the growing list of penetrating works on Singapore's authoritarian governance written by Singaporean scholars based overseas. In the preface, Rajah frankly acknowledges the intellectual benefit of writing about Singapore from distant shores: I have found it invaluable to exit the ideological fortress that Singapore can sometimes be in order to peel off, layer by layer, some of the assumptions embedded in Singapore speak-assumptions that have, until recently, been invisible to me (xv).The book focuses on the way the Singaporean state has manipulated the rule of while dismantling the constitutional and civil rights of its citizens through rule by processes. Rajah asserts that the law has been pivotal in legitimizing and consolidating the authoritarian state while subverting the dispersal of power that is inherent in plural democracies. In other words, the rule of has served as a crucial prop for the authoritarian state (284). Legislative initiatives have undermined opposition parties (Chapter 3), dismantled the independent press (Chapter 4), and stunted the development of an autonomous civil society (Chapters 5, 6, and 7). These claims, in effect, challenge the veracity of ratings agencies and organizations such as the World Bank Report of Governance, IMD World Competitiveness Report, Transparency International Corruption Perception Index and the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report and expose their uncritical endorsement of the PAP government's rule of claims. These rule of claims are largely restricted to matters pertaining to foreign investment, trade, and the economy, supporting Singapore's reputation as a regional economic hub and commercial center. …

Ensuring good governance in Singapore

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to attribute Singapore's good governance to the effective policies implemented by the People's Action Party (PAP) government and contend that it will be difficult to transfer Singapore's experience to other countries because of Singapore's unique circumstances and favourable policy context.Design/methodology/approachThe paper analyses four policies initiated by the PAP government: comprehensive reform of the Singapore Civil Service; anti‐corruption measures; decentralization of the Public Service Commission; and payment of competitive salaries to attract and retain the best candidates to the government. The effectiveness of these policies is assessed by referring to Singapore's performance on eight governance indicators.FindingsThe four policies are effective, as reflected in Singapore's superior rankings and scores on eight indicators: Global Competitiveness Report's (GCR's) competence of public officials; World Bank's indicator on government effectiveness; Political Economic Risk Consultancy's (PERC's) survey on bureaucratic effectiveness; Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index; PERC's survey on corruption; World Bank's indicator on control of corruption; World Bank's ease of doing business survey; and GCR's public trust of politicians survey. However, as Singapore's good governance is the result of the PAP government's political will and its favourable policy context, it is difficult to transfer Singapore's experience elsewhere because of the limited political will and unfavourable policy contexts in many Asian countries.Originality/valueThis paper will be useful to those interested in learning how Singapore succeeded in promoting good governance.

Singapore in 2011

Abstract In 2011, Singaporeans voted in parliamentary and presidential elections. The social networking media, dominated by alternative reporting and commentary, played a significant role in generating political interest and mobilizing oppositional thinking and support. Faced with a stronger oppositional presence and a politically emboldened electorate, the People's Action Party government won the elections but achieved its worst results ever.

The Ideology of Pragmatism: Neo-liberal Globalisation and Political Authoritarianism in Singapore

This article uncovers the strongly ideological quality in Singapore's theory and practice of pragmatism. It also points to a strongly pragmatic quality in the ideological negotiations that play out within the dynamics of hegemony. In this complex relationship, the combination of ideological and pragmatic manoeuvring over the decades has resulted in the historic political dominance of the People's Action Party (PAP) government in partnership with global capital. But in an evolving, diversifying and globalising society, this manoeuvring has also engendered a number of mismatched expectations. It has also seen a greater sensitivity and attention to the inherent ideological contradictions and socio-economic inequalities that may erode what has been a relatively stable partnership between state and capital. This article argues that Singapore's one-party dominant state is the result of continuous ideological work that deploys the rhetoric of pragmatism to link the notion of Singapore's impressive success and future prospects to its ability to attract global capital. In turn, this relies on maintaining a stable political system dominated by an experienced, meritocratic and technocratic PAP government. While this Singaporean conventional wisdom has supported the political and economic interests of the state and global capital in a period of neo-liberal globalisation, its internal contradictions and external pressures have also begun to challenge its hegemonic pre-eminence.

Politics and Ethnicity: Framing Racial Discrimination in Singapore

Racial discrimination is a global phenomenon that the United Nations seeks to eradicate. In contemporary Singapore, research shows that the basis for racial discrimination is anchored in the role of ethnic identity and how it frames the formulation of policies related to education, employment, housing, immigration and politics. These policies have been formulated and implemented by the People's Action Party (PAP) government that has been in power for over 50 years. When confronted with its racially based policies, the PAP government insists that it follows a tolerant approach towards different races and that it promotes the idea of multiculturalism and meritocracy as a racial equalizer. However, ethnic minorities in Singapore complain they are being discriminated against
 daily on the basis of their race or religion. They argue that their views are often not given airing in the local mainstream media and they are further prevented from discussing these issues openly due to legislation restricting freedom of expression and assembly on these matters. Given this background, the first visit of a UN Rapporteur on racism to Singapore, at the invitation of the PAP government in April 2010, allowed the city-state's race-based policies to be put in an international spotlight. This study examines the visit of the UN Rapporteur, his initial findings, government and civil society responses, and the significance of this first UN mission. The paper locates its research on racial discrimination in the context of Singapore's political framework and the United Nations' efforts to eradicate racism. It argues that ultimately, policy changes in Singapore can only take place as a result of politically challenging the PAP government.

Filling the Moral Void: The Christian Right in Singapore

In March 2009 a group of Anglican Pentecostal women took over the Association of Women for Action and Research, a secular women's rights group in Singapore. This sparked an intense month-long public debate over a variety of issues which included the increasing aggression of the “Christian Right,” the secular nature of public space in Singapore, sex education and tolerance for gay communities, culminating in state intervention. While conventional sociological studies have suggested a variety of explanations for the growing presence of Pentecostal Christians in the public sphere, such as religious stratification or their links to party politics, few have examined it within the framework of nation-building. This paper seeks to understand the recent emergence of the “Christian Right” and its exposition on various moral issues within a historical context – a context from which the People's Action Party government successfully arose, in part, due to its self-construction as a moral state, and argues that the post-industrial challenges of globalisation have forced the government to be less morally conservative, resulting in a perceived moral vacuum which certain segments of Pentecostal Christians have felt compelled to fill.

The State and the New Society: The Role of the Arts in Singapore Nation-building

This paper takes an historical perspective on the trajectory of Singapore's arts and cultural landscape from 1965 to 2000. It examines the arts and cultural field as an ideological site within which the People's Action Party government constantly sought to reinvent or vision a new society. From harnessing the arts for the task of creating “civilised” and “cultured” citizens immediately after independence, as well as to play out multicultural fantasies, to the government's ‘Global City for the Arts' project in the 1990s for economic imperatives, arts and culture has not only been ideologically instrumental for nation-building purposes but also malleable to the ruling elite's changing visions of Singapore society. The PAP government's deployment of art to establish orthodoxy is a recurring feature in the paper, including its cooption of “renaissance” themes as early as 1980, thus purging ideals of romanticism from public discourse. The paper concludes that Singapore's cultural policy, although driven by economic impulses, will continue to be an important ideological instrument for nation-building.

Singapore in 2007: High Wage Ministers and the Management of Gays and Elderly

In 2007, the People's Action Party government raised top officials' salaries, already among the highest in the world. Cultural liberalization has finally encouraged the gay community to invoke a seldom used parliamentary process to petition Parliament to repeal the Victorian law that criminalizes homosexuality. The government began to deal with some issues for an impending aging population.

Election Strategy and Ethnic Politics in Singapore

According to Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s electoral system is essentially representative and does not suffer from significant ethnic conflict. Opposition leaders, however, denounce legislative elections as unfair and claim that Singapore's ethnic minorities disagree politically with the Chinese-dominated People's Action Party (PAP). This essay aims to test both of these hypotheses empirically, using freely available electoral and public-opinion data. Logistic regression of the 1968-2006 parliamentary election results by constituency indicates that the PAP government did create Group Representation Constituencies in 1988 so as to eliminate districts that had voted disproportionately for the opposition in 1984. Analysis using Gary King's method of ecological inference suggests that ethic polarization between Chinese and Malays was moderately high in the 1976 election, peaked in 1988, and was minimal in 2006. Indians, meanwhile, appear to have voted with the Chinese in all three elections. A parallel cross-sectional, logistic regression of the 2002 Singapore subset of the World Values Survey, however, has Indian respondents being slightly less likely to admit to dissatisfaction with the government and indicates that being Malay does not make one more willing to express such dissatisfaction. These empirical results thus cast doubt on the extent to which Singapore's elections have been truly free, fair, and devoid of ethnic tension. The findings also suggest that young, middle-class, highly educated Chinese have replaced working-class Malays as the greatest challenge to continued PAP dominance.

Singapore's National Day Rally speech: A site of ideological negotiation

This article analyses the inaugural National Day Rally speeches of three Singapore prime ministers. It locates these speeches in the continuous ideological work that the People's Action Party (PAP) government has to do in order to maintain consensus and forge new alliances among classes and social forces that are being transformed by globalisation. Increasingly, these speeches have had to deal with the contradictions between nation-building and the tensions between the liberal and reactionary tendencies of the global city. It is argued that such a situation has made it futile for the government to attempt a straightforward ideological mobilisation of the people into a relatively homogeneous national community. The PAP government's ideological struggle to forge consensus has been balanced by a strategy of divide-and-rule. Ironically, the rally speeches have been as much about dividing as they have been about uniting.

Singapore: Campaigning for the Future

The year 2006 witnessed several important events in Singapore, all of which have long-term political and economic significance. First, Singapore held its eleventh general election since independence, the first led by Lee Hsien Loong since becoming Prime Minister in August 2004 and Secretary General of the People's Action Party (PAP). Second, Singapore hosted the Annual Meetings of the Boards of Governors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group, amidst civil society organizations' protest and negative international press coverage on the Singapore government's refusal to admit a number of activists. Third, the investment of government-linked Temasek in Shin Corp, the family business of Thailand's former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was deposed in a military coup in September, weathered legal problems and continued to develop into a policy lesson in government-business relations for both the countries involved. Singapore's economy picked up steam in the middle of the year, and experienced a relatively robust growth rate of 7.7 per cent. At the end of the year, the PAP government announced its intention to increase the Goods and Services Tax (GST) by 2 per cent, that is, from 5 to 7 per cent. The century-old Penal Code was given an extensive review and public feedback was sought, but Internet free speech was curtailed with the imposition of stricter regulations. Smoke haze from fires in Indonesia covered most of the country in October, prompting once again an urgent call by ASEAN to help Indonesia fight the forest fires. Two stalwarts of independent Singapore, S. Rajaratnam, Minister for Foreign Affairs (1965-80) and Deputy Prime Minister (1980-85), and Lim Kim San, who was credited with the public housing programme, passed away at the age of 81.

SINGAPORE: Globalizing on Its Own Terms

Lee Hsien Loong's succession of Goh Chok Tong as Prime Minister (PM) in August 2004 was long anticipated. It was thus unsurprising that political analysts spent 2005 dissecting the new PM's every public utterance for clues as to the character of his new administration. These analysts have endeavoured to describe and define the new Lee administration perhaps not just to distinguish it from the long shadow of Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and the highly popular Senior Minister Goh, but also to decipher the People's Action Party (PAP) government's visions for Singapore at the dawn of the 21st century. In a one-party state with only three prime ministers since independence, it is tempting to see each transition as epochal even if the PAP government takes pains to spread the message of ideological continuity and political stability. It was thus inevitable that Lee's widely publicized inaugural open and inclusive slogan would be contrasted with Goh's own kinder, gentler tagline as though a national shift had quietly occurred between administrations. Given the growing demands of an increasingly cosmopolitan citizenry, Lee's slogan was interpreted by some to be a hint at further political liberalization, even prompting the Straits Times to herald in a brave new Singapore; one that was moving away from a one-size-fits-all paradigm in terms of government policies.1 Initial expectations of greater political liberalization have, however, at the close of 2005, been replaced by a more sober appreciation of the fact that the proposed open and inclusive was never intended to signal democratic openness but, rather, societal acceptance of different personal and social achievements. By celebrating individuals who have wandered off the beaten track and achieved success in non-academic fields and non-mainstream careers, the message of the new Lee administration was that society no longer