[jsdalton]

What is your thesis, exactly? People have a finite amount of attention they are willing to devote to politics, and the obsession with polling thus excludes them from paying attention to these supposedly undemocratic features?

Seems far fetched to me but I'd imagine it's testable. One could test people about their knowledge of poll data and then see whether a higher degree of interest in polls correlated with a lower awareness of these undemocratic feature. I would imagine you'd find your thesis refuted in such a test.

Anyhow, it's likely you're trying to convey something that I'm not quite understanding so please feel free to correct me.

Speaking personally, I would posit that the media puts more focus on polls because they are both interesting and timely to viewers, where as discussions about the flaws of first-past-the-post voting are more dry and are not timely -- timeliness being a crucial determiner of what gets reported as news. So unless there are newsmakers actively making a spectacle about the issue, you're not going to here about it in mainstream media.

[rolux]

If you're asking me for a thesis, then I guess it would include the idea that what people should be willing to devote to politics is more than, and fundamentally different from, attention. Once politics become politics of attention, they become, quite precisely, the spectacle you're referring to: a real-time feed of gossip, gaffes and stats.

More specifically though, my impression was, quite simply, that obsession with details, as a mainstream phenomenon, often coincides with the inability or unwillingness to see the bigger picture. While I can't back this up with statistical data, I'm pretty sure there's a well-founded psychological term for it.

[RyanMcGreal]

Here's a hypothesis for you: it's easier to follow the polls than it is to follow the issues, and when polling soundbites are ubiquitous, people will tend to follow the polls instead of following the issues.

You can spend an hour watching a presidential debate (plus additional hours looking up the various claims made), or you can spend a minute reading the heading, deck and first paragraph of an article that says this or that candidate "won" the debate.

Polls function as a kind of supernormal stimulus [1] that displace real analysis, in a manner analogous to the way that junk food, which distils fat, sugar and salt to their essence, displaces whole foods.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus