As my classmates have pointed out, Please Vote for Me does not depict a full democracy as we understand it. The students did not get to pick the candidates up for a vote; if they didn’t like Cheng Cheng, Xu Xiaofei, or Luo Lei, they were basically out of luck. But even with its limited democratic scope, the class election in Please Vote for Me is instructive as to the applicability of Machiavelli’s concepts in electoral settings. In The Prince, Machiavelli wasn’t laying out the tricks by which one gains power in a democracy; he was running through how a prince kept his power once he had assumed it. The broader point was that politics is not an area for the virtuous; some degree of ruthlessness is required to obtain and consolidate power. Xu Xiaofei did not intuit this notion, and spent a campaign offering earnest pleas for support without undermining her opponents. She quickly fell behind. Cheng Cheng displayed an alarmingly natural grasp of subterfuge, plotting to undermine his foes from the moment his candidacy was announced. His dictatorial ambitions were similarly clear: he wanted to become class monitor because he liked to “order people around”. Luo Lei, while authoritarian – his previous tenure as class monitor was not free of shirt-tugging and shoving to the end of discipline – wanted to be class monitor to allow students to do what they pleased. When his campaign faltered, he promoted his cause with gifts to his fellow students. Cheng Cheng, by contrast, could only resort to further insults when his electoral prospects hit a downturn. It’s better to be feared than loved while ruling, perhaps, but to get elected one needs a mix of both; this is why Luo Lei won the privilege of harassing his fellow students to orderliness while Cheng Cheng remained a brooding back-row tyrant. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have family that runs the police department, allowing one to curry favor with ones classmates by taking them on a monorail trip. Xiaofei, daughter of a single mother and seemingly unable to be mean, never had a chance.