Singapore and its often-referenced “exceptionalism” have long drawn attention from social scientists, if not for the country's ostensible developmental success, then for its “policy lab” approach to addressing social, political, and economic challenges. Both the death of founding statesman Lee Kuan Yew and the celebration of fifty years of independence, in 2015, have reinvigorated interest in questions of its successes, its policies, and its future.

Despite this general interest, few recent book-length scholarly works have been dedicated to critically assessing the nuances of Singapore's policy environment. Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus, edited by Donald Low and Sudhir Vadaketh, does just this, with a collection of fifteen chapters that cover a wide spectrum of territory related to the country's development. The policy backgrounds of both editors are reflected in the stated aims of the volume: to compile and examine an array of practical alternatives to the current political model, and to inject dynamism into policy debates, which the editors see as stunted by the binary framing often favored by the country's ruling People's Action Party (PAP) government.

The book is divided into three sections. The first explores Singapore's exceptionalism, addressing specifically whether long-held and simplistic assumptions about the success of the Singapore model obscure outcomes that are decidedly more complex. Included in that discussion are assessments of income inequality, the role of population growth in economic development, the nature of Singapore's meritocracy, and the challenges around identity formation in the diverse and ever-changing country. The second section examines policies in the key areas of population growth, housing, and social security, arguing in each case that there exists a range of credible alternatives to a status quo that no longer adequately addresses on-the-ground realities. The third section examines the past, current, and future dynamics of governance and democracy in Singapore's single party dominant system. These chapters focus especially on what is argued to be the erosion of the ‘Singapore consensus’—in which an acquiescent population accepts restrictions on personal liberties in exchange for political stability and economic growth—and the paths through which Singapore's polity might evolve to include a greater spectrum of perspectives and participants.

Low and Vadaketh write that they are “less worried about the risks of polarisation than [they] are about the effects of incumbency, the inertia of the status quo, and the tyranny of old ideas and unquestioned, unchallenged ideologies” (p. 11). This position sets the tone for the book and makes it a refreshing contribution to policy discussions in a country where the bounds of political and social debates are often set quite narrowly. Importantly, Low and Vadaketh manage this open dynamic without resorting the almost reflexive contrarianism that characterizes many other challenges to the Singapore model; the contributions are, with few exceptions, level-headed and pragmatic explorations of complex policy issues and their potential solutions.

While the book clearly is written to impact policy debates within Singapore, its accessible manner makes it well suited for non-specialists of the country to develop a more nuanced understanding of its policy environment. This makes it an important and timely contribution, given the frequent but often analytically thin references in popular publications like The Economist to Singapore's unique approach to development. Yet this emphasis on readability comes at the expense of technical discussions of policy detail. A student whose interests lie in understanding changes to the technical aspects of agenda setting, deliberation, and implementation of policy in the Singapore model, for example, might want additional detail and a more comprehensive development of key arguments. The discussion on meritocracy, for example, is effective in adding nuance to a debate that often employs only the broadest of brush strokes, but it ends short of presenting practical prescriptions for the range of sectors in Singapore that dogmatically adhere to the concept.

On the broadest level, Low and Vadaketh argue that Singapore's 2011 general election—in which the PAP secured victory with just over 60 percent of the popular vote, its lowest margin in years—marked a watershed moment in the decline of the Singapore consensus and an end to the era of unchallenged PAP dominance. In the “new normal” of this post-2011 climate, the contest of ideas and ideologies would be increasingly important, necessitating the rewriting of the relationship between the state and society. Yet in 2015, not long after the publication of this book, the PAP won the subsequent general election by a landslide, securing one of its strongest mandates in decades. Low and Vadaketh did foretell that the PAP's more responsive tones and emphasis on material outcomes in the early post-2011 climate could swing some votes back to the PAP, but the magnitude of that swing is sufficiently large to question just how pervasive the demands for political pluralism really are in Singapore's “new normal.” This outcome in no way limits the value of Hard Choices, but it does underscore how complex and unpredictable the politics of the small—and dare we say ‘exceptional’—city-state really are.