A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF POWER AND AGENCY: SINGAPORE’S CHANGING GOVERNMENT-CITIZEN DYNAMIC

Abstract

The 2011 General Elections marked a new era for governance in Singapore. The surprising decrease in support for the ruling party hinted at the need for changes to be made to governance. This, coupled with ongoing calls for greater democracy in Singapore, begged the question of whether efforts were being made for betterment of Singapore’s model of governance through heeding the calls for greater democracy. Greater democracy necessitates that governments loosen the hold on their ruling power and accord more agency to the citizenry to effect change in policy-making. Language is one of the ways in which power and agency is maintained and constructed among social groups in society. Language can therefore be revealing of the mediation of the power relations and agency of social groups in reality. The language of national speeches in Singapore was analysed with the purpose of uncovering how the Singaporean government mediates power relations and agency between them and the citizens. Four national speeches were selected – two delivered before 2011 and two delivered after. Each speech underwent a speech act analysis of its locutions and illocutions, as well as a discoursal representation analysis of the government and citizens. Searle’s (1979) Taxonomy of Speech Acts and Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Approach for Critical Discourse Analysis were adopted for the analysis. Following which, a quantitative analysis was done comparatively between speeches from the pre- and post-2011 eras of governance with the aim of identifying the changes between both time periods. The interpretation of the obtained results show that both the government’s retention of power and citizens’ agency decreased post-2011. This suggests that there have been efforts by the government to remodel governance in Singapore, albeit with limited change.