People's Action Party

The People's Action Party (abbreviation: PAP) is a major conservative centre-right political party in Singapore and one of three contemporary political parties represented in Parliament, alongside the opposition Workers' Party (WP) and Progress Singapore Party (PSP).

Initially founded as a traditional centre-left party in 1954, the leftist faction was soon expelled from the party in 1961 by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in the midst of Singapore's merger with Malaysia, desiring to move the party's ideology towards the centre after its first electoral victory in 1959. Beginning in the 1960s, the party began to move towards the centre-right. Following the 1965 agreement which led to Singapore's independence from Malaysia, the entire opposition boycotted the general elections in 1968, except for the Worker's Party, which won no seats in the election. For decades thereafter, the PAP exercised exclusivity over its governance of national institutions and become the largest political party in the country.

From 1965 to 1981, the PAP was the only political force represented in Parliament until it saw its first electoral defeat to the WP at a by-election in the constituency of Anson. Nevertheless, the PAP has not seen its hegemony threatened and has always received over 60% of the votes and 80% of the seats in every subsequent general election. Having governed for over six decades, the PAP is the longest uninterrupted governing party among modern multiparty parliamentary democracies. It is the second-longest governing party in history after Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, which led for 71 years from 1929 to 2000.

Positioned on the centre-right of Singapore politics, the PAP is ideologically socially conservative and economically liberal. The party generally favours free-market economics, having turned Singapore's economy into one of the world's freest and most open, but has at times engaged in state interventionism reminiscent of welfare capitalist policies. The party has supported the creation of state-owned enterprises, known locally as government-linked corporations. This was done in order to jumpstart industrialisation, spearhead economic development and lead to economic growth, primarily job creation, in various sectors of the Singaporean economy. Socially, the PAP supports communitarianism and civic nationalism. The cohesion of the country's main ethnic groups into a single Singaporean national identity forms the basis of many of its social policies. On foreign policy, it favours maintaining a strong and robust military, serving as a purportedly indispensable guarantor of the country's continued sovereignty within the context of its strategic position for international finance and trade.