Well, continuing on the point that Singapore is not a "True blue democracy", I agree to a large extent. Critics of Singapore argue that Singapore is closer to an illiberal democracy, or even an authoritarian state, as compared with our perception of ourselves as democratic. Not to blaspheme or slander the government or anything, but the ruling party of Singapore has been around and in control for decades, and have "tweaked" the rules to strengthen their position. For example, there have been numerous high profile cases of opposition representatives being sued for defamation of the ruling party, and thus being forced to declare bankruptcy and drop out of the elections. There also have been numerous claims of bias in allocating funds for projects in opposition ruled GRCs. However, it is true that Singapore does have basis for its claim to be democratic, as there are elections and the "right to vote" for candidates who successfully manage to run for MP in the GRC. However, I feel the claim of Singapore more as a socialist democracy, with large governmental influences in areas such as the economy, and housing, more evidently, can be better justified. This large influence of the government means that Singapore will never become a true democratic state.
However, back to the idea of a directly democratic state (which I will assume as the "ideal" of democracy), there are numerous famed examples of this form of democracy being successful, for example, back to the example of the National Library saga, we can see the obvious differences in the two systems. Firstly, petitions in Singapore are largely ineffective such as in the aforementioned case. However, in Switzerland, if one were to be able to gather 50,000 signatures within 100 days, there is a high chance of the decision being overturned. I am sure there are many more reasons why Singapore is not a truly democratic state, and the closest workable system to "true democracy" is direct democracy, though there are also flaws in this system)

Jeremy