Elections are one of the most prominent institutions in democracies, being themselves the mechanism by which voters express what programmes they desire of the state and what agents they would have marshal these programmes on their behalf. Vitally also, elections are the citizen's primary means of holding their governments to account.

This year, starting October, a global campaign named Why Democracy? will be broadcast on television and the internet. It seeks to ask questions of the global population on their understanding of democracy and their perception of it as a solution to the problems of our times.

The clip displayed is a short overview of one of the ten films in the series. Titled Please Vote for Me, it follows the story of a Chinese class of seven to eight year olds who are for the first time using an election to select their class monitor.

The film may be seen as a critique of the Chinese system and its democratic culture, but more than that it highlights several deficiencies of modern democracies. You will notice for example that the candidates available to the electorate are limited by outside forces and put forward by what are clearly undemocratic processes. Like in many modern democracies, the candidates here crowd around a pre-defined set of ideas with restrictions imposed on them either by the global system or by choice.

There are many other similarities with our electoral process in Kenya. The use of demonisation and negative campaigning, the peculiar attraction to candidates with a history of violence and coercion, the use of bribes in the electoral process and the manner in which crowds are whipped up to wholly emotive and irrational decisions.

Can you see any other similarities? Is democracy right for Kenya? A longer version is available on the MySpace page for the Why Democracy? project.