[pmyteh]

> No, it's not, in general; the purpose of representative democracy is to allow the actions of the state to give effect to the desires of the people, on the premise that even most people with the requisite ability to effectively decide how to give effect to their desires aren't optimally employed spending all their time figuring out how the state should do that.

That's one argument for representative democracy (and, I think, the best one for why participatory democracy is tricky) but it's not the intention behind existing representative institutions, at least in the US and the UK (and the countries who inherited different parts of our systems).

Edmund Burke's address to the electors of Bristol contains one of the most famous declarations of this principle: 'Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.'

The Federalist papers show that the US model was also not designed to operate as an efficient aggregator of citizens' opinions, but more as a means of the public endorsing competent and honest representatives to govern on their behalf.

The classic book-length exposition of this model (which is basically modern elite orthodoxy) is 'Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy', by Joseph Schumpeter. David Held's 'Models of Democracy' is a good comparative text, though there are lots of those to chose from.