Should a non-People’s Action Party government take over, they are going to have a lot of problems with the ministries — this seems to be a common view expressed by many whenever I pose the question of transition.
The belief that the higher levels of the civil service have been thoroughly politicised is widespread. My friends speak of obstruction and covert undermining. “They won’t be able to trust the top two, three or four layers of the administration,” says one.
The senior civil servants “will block new initiatives, making the new government ineffective, waiting for the return of the PAP,” says another.
I’m not sure that calling the top levels of the civil service ‘politicised’ is completely apt. I think it’s more a case of the seniormost civil servants sharing similar worldviews as the PAP. This would be no accident; they’d have been selected because they shared the same worldviews. They would also be personally invested in the policies that the previous PAP minister carried out, policies that they themselves helped design. Thus, any non-PAP minister’s attempt to depart from those policies would strike them as “rash decisions”; there would be a natural resistance, one bolstered by a feeling that they’re the only bulwark left defending “sanity” and “Singapore’s best interests”.
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http://yawningbread.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/more-needs-to-be-done-to-prepare-for-electoral-change/