> These politicians are representative of their voters, as democracy should be.

Isn't it that they make decisions on behalf of the voters and should take the best professional advice on their behalf?

Professional advice is not necessarily the best political advise, unfortunately. It's a giant PR/social-media game and they have to play it otherwise the other side will get the upper hand. It's very unfortunate that we've turned "democracy" into such a game instead of a mechanism for societal-level decision making.

The same is true in all political systems. A king must constantly play a social media game too or their rivals may gain the upper hand. A modern despot must constantly ensure that they never show weakness for the same reasons. There are always rivals and there is always a game.

So far we have never come up with a working political system that banishes this stuff. It's a game theory problem.

Democracy is just as vulnerable to Goodhart's law as everything else.

I don’t have any well-thought-out solutions, but I am tickled by the idea of frequently anarchically randomising the way power gets donated from the people to the government.

I somewhat like the idea of having a democracy without parliament or elections. Instead, whenever a law needs to be made (either because the administration identifies the need or because something akin to a ballot initiative gets enough signatures) 100 people are drawn from the population at random and tasked with writing that law. They are allowed to summon/subpoena as many experts as they like to help them with drafting the law.

The idea is that every citizen would be involved in one, maybe two laws in their entire lifetime, therefore giving them the sense that this is the one time they can contribute to politics in a meaningful way. Also their names are tied to that particular law forever, meaning that fear of social pressure could be more effective than for a politician who votes for 1000s of things in their political career.

I think Ireland has done something along this line related to abortion and gay marriage.

That's up to the voters. They often have other priorities.

That is the difference between a democracy and a republic.

That is the difference between a chicken and a bird.

Very true. Problem is that, while democracy to be effective requires people to be educated and informed, bad politicians aim to the opposite.

It used to be a little more common that in representative democracies, the representatives were actually competent elites.