Institute of Policy Studies: New citizens account for 2% of GE2015 votes at most

Okay, that clears some of the air.

Belmont Lay| September 18, 06:32 PM

Using some mathematics, publicly-available information and data crunching, Institute of Policy Studies Research Associate Debbie Soon found -- based on some assumptions -- that new citizens who appeared after General Election 2011 formed only about 2 percent of the total 2.46 million voters in GE2015.

In short, this means the 9.8 percent national vote swing in PAP's favour was not entirely caused by new citizens even if all of them are boldly assumed to have voted for the incumbent.

From the IPS article, GE2015: What impact did new citizens have on the PAP’s vote share?:

However, my calculations based on publicly-available national data and information at the time of writing suggest that citizens minted after the “watershed” 2011 General Election (GE2011) formed only some 2% of total voters in GE2015.

In my analysis, I have focused only on individuals who became new citizens after GE2011. The study of this group is critical to understanding if new citizens did indeed significantly contribute to the 9.8% increase in the PAP’s vote share, given that they would have been voting for the first time, while citizens who were naturalised earlier would have voted in 2011.

To get figures of new citizens to Singapore from 2011 to 2015, I compiled and extrapolated from the 2012, 2013 and 2014 releases of Population in Brief published by the National Population and Talent Division.

As the new citizens data for 2014 and 2015 are not yet available, estimates were made based on an upper and lower limit of Singapore admitting between 15,000 and 25,000 new citizens each year. This was based on the government’s statement in 2013 that it would keep to this specified range in the number of new citizens that would be brought in each year.

[...]

First, we matched the estimated proportion of new citizens to the total pool of eligible voters in GE2015. This gave us a range of 1.79 – 2.06% (or 44,201 to 50,749 people in relation to a total base of 2,462,926 electors).

Second, we looked at the ratio of estimated new citizens to votes gained by the PAP between GE2011 to GE2015 general elections. There was an increase of 367,029 of votes for the PAP between the two elections. If we make the bold assumption that all the new voters uniformly voted for the PAP, this works out to just 12.04–13.83% of that increase.

So, to conclude, this demonstrates that even if all new citizens who joined the ranks of the local electorate after GE2011 did indeed vote for the PAP, they would have contributed a maximum of some 2% to the total pool of eligible voters, and comprised not more than 14% of the increase in votes for the PAP between GE2011 and GE2015

 

Click here for the full article on IPS Commons:

ips-commons-new-citizens

 

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