[verisimi]

Do you realise we have never had 'democracy' - we have 'representative democracy', a totally different thing. Thousands, perhaps millions of people, vote once every 4-5 years for one person to represent them on thousands of governmental decisions. That person is under no constraints to do what they said to gain your vote either - they can do the exact opposite with no repercussion.

Voting as we have it, is a highly abstract, meta "democracy", with 'the will of the people' effecting a meaningless level of force on the tiller. As per the design.

[saghm]

At least in the US, each person has a lot more than one representative they vote for, with multiple levels of government with different intended scopes. As much as that doesn't completely eliminate the problems you describe, I'd argue that that focus on only the first election listed in the ballot at the expense of the others is one of the (many) causes of how we ended in the state we are today. It's a lot easier for someone to be elected to represent you while ignoring your interests if you don't even know or care about the fact that they're running. If people cared more about local elections (and even federal elections other than for president), there would be at least some increase in pressure for legislative bodies to respond to the will of the people. Without that, the issue isn't even that they're going the opposite of what the people who voted for them want, but the the number of people who voted for them (or even for the candidates they're running against) aren't anywhere close to representative proportion of the population. We don't really know if representative democracy would approximate actual democracy because the people they're representing aren't the full population, but the small segment of politically active ones.