The Evergreen elementary school classroom election documented in “Please Vote For Me” shows us democracy in its most rudimentary form: candidates for a leadership position and a classroom full of voters with an equal say on the election outcome. Despite these basic conditions being met, the election nevertheless strays from the theoretical ideal of democracy.
Firstly, the students are poorly informed about democracy and its practices. At the beginning of the documentary, Xiaofei even asks what it means to vote. In an ideal democracy, the voters are well-informed about both the system and the candidates. Still, the election had the potential to provide a demonstration of what happens when democracy is introduced to an uninitiated group of voters. Unfortunately, the heavy involvement of the candidates’ parents means that their preconceptions of democracy influenced the election.
Additionally, Karl and Schmitter emphasize that truly democratic elections are fair, which the class monitor election was not. This is most evident in the bribery Luo Lei uses to collect votes. Despite seemingly being disliked by much of the class because of his strictness as class monitor and tendency for violence, he wins the election by a large margin because he takes the class on a field trip and hands out gifts at the end of his speech. Luo Lei’s history of violent behavior also likely implicitly threatened the class, who may very well have thought he would react violently to losing. This perceived lack of safety to vote as one pleases, coupled with Luo Lei’s blatant bribery, make the election unfair and thus undemocratic.
Interestingly, however, there are many similarities between the “democracy” on show at Evergreen elementary school and what we see in many supposedly democratic countries all over the world. Does this mean that we can’t consider these elections to be truly democratic? And if we do consider them democratic, does that make Luo Lei’s election democratic as well? Considering the corruption, unequal funding distribution among candidates, and/or even violent threats present in many (if not all) of today’s so-called democracies, can we say that any state has achieved anything near the ideal democracy?
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I definitely found myself coming to similar inquiries as I thought about the performance of democracy in this third grade classroom. The lack of an ideal democracy certainly is two-fold. Indeed, the students lack the knowledge needed to understand the system of government, and from there, they are unable to hold the elected officials accountable for any actions that stray from democracy. Does this reflect democracies we see across the globe? It is not rare for citizens to lack a complete understanding of their state of government, especially when it offers them rights (ie. non-authoritarian). Perhaps, in some sense, these complexities cause citizens to grow more less enthusiastic of democratic forms of government, as Mounk observes in his article. I believe however, that while democracy in its ideal form may be unattainable, it is still worth striving for it via education, the latter being a mechanism to instill a sense of empowerment in a country’s citizens.