How Singaporean Middle-Class View Democracy.

In the debate about democracy and its universal character there are two contrary positions: clear expectations for new waves of democracy in Asia (Diamond 2012) versus the non-compliance of Asian values with the concept of democracy, as a genuine western concept (Kausikan 1998). The planned paper explores the understanding of democracy of one of those Asian countries Diamond is expecting to democratize. A couple of Asian countries are particularly interesting as the understanding of democracy of the countries populations seems to differ from indices to measure the quality of democracy (Lu and Shi 2015). One of them is Singapore, where people are highly satisfied with the way democracy works, but ranked by Freedom House as partly free only. In Singapore the conditions to democratize are expected to be extremely favorable according to the western-liberal tradition of democracy and due to arguments of modernization theory. In this context there is a large debate if and under which circumstances middle-class could become an engine to drive democratization, in particular regarding economic development and persisting authoritarianism (Chen and Lu 2011, Wu et al. 2017). The question I would like to answer is, in how fare especially the Singaporean middle class desires democracy and how they view democracy. This will be measured by Repertory Grid, a mixed-method approach allowing to measure support and, more importantly, the understanding of democracy beyond enquiring support of normative (western) connotations of democracy. The paper will present first results of Repertory Grid Interviews conducted in Singapore.