Evidence-Based Policymaking: The Key to Ending Political Paralysis

by AR

Minister for Health Ong Ye Kung’s recent quip on the Straits Times’ podcast, where he said “you don’t want a government that is embroiled in paralysis” has been making waves.

It’s a bold statement to make for a Minister from the only party which has ruled over Singapore since its independence. Nonetheless, I agree with the minister, and I’m sure most Singaporeans want to be governed by an effective government and good policy.

Unfortunately, that’s where my agreement with Mr Ong ends because I don’t believe that the People’s Action Party (PAP) is able to save itself from the paralysing political limbo our country has languished in for decades. There are many reasons why.

One of the key reasons, I believe, is that the PAP is so entrenched in its adherence to its ideological tenets of conservatism, austerity, elitism, and financialisation that it is unable to adopt evidence-based policies which prioritise people over profit.

In Singapore, policies are crafted by the elite. This is the basis of programmes such as the Public Service Commission, wherein our top-performing students study in far-flung overseas universities before returning to Singapore to craft policies as part of the civil service. Inherent in this form of policy-making is a core belief that the elite are best placed to craft policy.

Not only do these policy-making bureaucrats tend to come from more well-to-do backgrounds — which predisposes them to academic achievement —  but they also tend to be the only ones who have access to national-level data.

Without the right to Freedom of Information (FOI), as well as the government’s reluctance to disclose disaggregated data, it’s hard to suggest alternative policies or dispute those which the government arrives at.

Despite this and against all odds, Singaporean academics, grassroots researchers and ordinary people throughout the years have worked to gather the resources needed to propose evidence-based alternatives —  and produced excellent policy research.

This ranges from work done surrounding Minimum Income Standards to service-based research from NGOs like HOME, to recent work done about Unconditional Cash Transfers by AWWA.

Not only do these projects produce rigorous evidence to back up their claims despite little to no state funding, they are also forced to endure relentless attacks and accept some level of political risk.

This article by sociologist Teo You Yenn on Academia.sg reveals just a fraction of what alternative voices in the policy space have to face -- ranging from unreasonable demands to correct “factual errors” in her book, to even having funding pulled from her project on Minimum Income Standards last minute.

The hostility and coercion directed at evidence-based policy research that threatens to challenge the ideological pillars of the PAP is deeply troubling. It reveals how unscientific and dogmatic our model of governance has become.

As someone whose primary research interest is poverty reduction, I’m deeply frustrated with how this dogmatism has resulted in a frustrating stalemate with inequality.

Discussions about poverty, from the classroom to Parliament, adhere to national myths that narrativise poverty as a combination of bad luck and bad choices. The popularisation of these myths as “common sense” is the basis upon which a lot of our policies are crafted.

The hypothesis we are told about poverty is this: Poor people, because of laziness, lack of skill and training, and/or unfortunate circumstances, are stuck in low-paying jobs or are unemployed— and the government’s role is to alter their behaviour or “upskill” these workers so that they make more money, while providing a pittance through schemes like ComCare for the most destitute to survive (as long as they meet a rigid criteria) so that they at least have the opportunity to “pull themselves out” of poverty.

If “too much” aid is provided or given to the wrong people, then this supposedly disincentivises the poor from working and taking action to escape poverty -- because they can simply rely on handouts to survive.

This hypothesis was taught to me in my Economics degree, and I see its logic reproduced everywhere in how our society responds to poverty. It stems from theories central to conservative welfare economics and public economics.

But at the end of the day, this is still just a hypothesis. It is founded on certain assumptions — and very convenient ones at that, which shift our attention away from larger structural factors, like our country’s weak labour protections, financialised social welfare systems, reliance on the nuclear family unit and non-existent civil freedoms, which I would argue are the key factors that legitimise the necessity of a class of poor people, regardless of anyone’s individual choices.

Crucially, the narrative that poverty stems from individual shortcomings is taken as the “common sense” basis upon which our government investigates policy. It gathers evidence to justify policies operating from those assumptions.

But the field of poverty studies has shown, through experiments and investigations which don’t begin with those assumptions, that poverty is much more complex than a group of languorous people who just can’t seem to get with the programme.

We also know that poverty, like many other social phenomena, is something that has particularities specific to the context in which it is situated in.

If we are really invested in finding solutions to this problem instead of politicking and scolding each other in Parliament, we need to be serious about taking a scientific and methodical approach through research that asks systemic questions and performs impartial experiments. For example:

To what extent do structural factors entrench people in poverty?

How does our wage policy play a part in this?

How do alternative policies perform in eradicating poverty for our national context?

How do norms like the nuclear family unit contribute to poverty?

How effective is our current spending on the poor in producing positive outcomes?

The government has the resources and the expertise to conduct local trials of evidence-based solutions to poverty, which have been shown to work elsewhere.

Unfortunately, it often does not have the political will to undertake these experiments because they threaten the ideological and political basis which it prides itself on. More often than not, as shown before, it is even hostile towards attempts at them.

What’s an example of a policy experiment that can give us useful clues about solutions which actually work?

Unconditional Cash Transfers, which increasingly have taken centre stage in poverty studies, are a well-evidenced alternative to traditional forms of means-tested welfare, which stringently assesses applicants and provides small and customised amounts of aid for limited periods of time.

A 2024 study by AWWA was the first randomised controlled trial of a UCT programme in Singapore, and it produced results which exceeded even my own expectations (I’m a huge fan of UCT and UBI policies).

The treatment group showed a statistically significant improvement in job security, income, physical and mental health, and much higher savings. As such, by nearly all metrics, the treatment group certainly had a much higher chance of escaping poverty in the long run.

It’s tragic that the first UCT trial in Singapore was only done in 2024, and it wasn’t even funded by the government!

A similar study from 2016 by AWARE which centered on unconditional housing provision also showed stellar results, such as improved employment, the ability to secure stable housing and improved child well-being.

Singapore’s resistance to evidence-based poverty reduction extends far beyond its dismissal of UCTs, reflecting a broader pattern of policy-making that prioritizes ideological rigidity over empirical efficacy.

While countries like Finland— with its universal basic income trials — and Portugal — with its decriminalization and housing-provision approach to drug poverty — have redefined success by following data, Singapore doubles down on conditional, punitive aid.

Schemes such as Workfare’s stringent requirements or the exclusionary design of ComCare persist, despite research showing such measures deepen poverty traps.

The austerity our government practices is something which has spelt out disaster in other countries. For example, the UK’s Labour Party has been rolling back a whole slew of social protection policies, such as disability benefits, funding for the NHS, and unemployment benefits.

We are seeing in real-time across the globe what the denial of strong social safety nets does to racial minorities, the poor, the disabled, and the elderly.

Let’s learn from this. When policy becomes a battleground for politicking rather than a discipline focused on human welfare, the result is avoidable suffering.

Rising cost pressures and stagnating wages are putting more and more of our population in abhorrent positions of destitution and indignity. People are also experiencing poverty in unprecedented and unstudied ways.

For example, CNA recently reported on the alarming trend of gig workers with insurmountable debt owed to the platform operators they work for.

According to a 2022 DBS study, these same gig workers are some of the most vulnerable workers in Singapore, whereby their expense-to-income ratio was reported to be 112%.

What was our government’s response to this? The Platform Workers’ Act — which does little to address gig workers’ earning power beyond mandating CPF for those born after 1995 (which is likely to mean depressed cash wages) and expanding access to the Workfare Income Supplement, which provides an insignificant amount of cash assistance for the income bracket which is eligible to receive it.

Alternative proposals from the Progress Singapore Party (PSP), like a minimum base fare, were summarily dismissed.

While the new Platform Workers Act mandates CPF contributions from platform operators starting in 2025, it does little to address structural wage gaps or provide more substantive labour protections.

As a result, platform operators continue to benefit from a system where gig workers operate with barely any rights or income security — perpetuating a status quo of precarious, low-paid labour.

These developments are urgent indicators of bigger problems to come. Let’s not let ideological paralysis get in the way of our pursuit of solutions that actually work.

AR studies public policy. Her research interests lie in poverty reduction, labour and health inequality. She is part of several grassroots and working-class movements. She was also a contributor to The People’s Manifesto.