Religions and Representation 2

Alex Au's article pointed me to the religions of the new candidates of the ruling party. Similar to the now-dissolved parliament, a "hugely disproportionate number of [the new] PAP candidates declare themselves to be Christian." And since I have the data of the religions of the now-ex Members of Parliament, I decided to compile them together to get a breakdown of the religions of the candidates that the ruling party will field for this upcoming election. The breakdown is as follow:

The new candidates who stated “无” (defined as "-less; not to have; no; none; not; to lack; un-" according to the Chinese-English Dictionary) as their religion in their ZaoBao Profile are listed as "Free Thinker/ No Religion."

As for the re-running candidates, those who listed themselves as "Free Thinker," and who listed their religion as "NIL" in the Parliament of Singapore's website are assumed to have on religion.

For those who did not specify their religion, I googled them up (Google has the answer to everything! Well, almost), and try to get the most credible sources (speeches, news article, videos, and in only one case Wikipedia) I can find. The spreadsheet with the candidates' names, religions, and the reference links is here. And so I managed to reduce the number of unspecified to 12.

And as per the previous post, the candidates are then further grouped into the following categories - Buddhism/Taoism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Other Religions, No Religion. And a chi-square distribution test is then calculated to test the goodness of fit between the observed distribution of religions among the candidates, and the actual distribution of religions among the resident population according to Census 2010.

Perhaps not unexpectedly, there is a significant difference (X² (5)= 58.573, P < .01) between the observed distribution of religions among the candidates, and the actual distribution of religions among the resident population.

And while I will still note that the candidates are selected based on their merits, the distribution does raise a few questions.

1. Are the Buddhists and/or Taoists not as capable? If they are not as capable, why?
2. If they are equally capable, why are they not as well-represented? Is there something that is stopping them from stepping forward to serve the nation?

Unfortunately, I have no answers to these questions.