More democracy does not necessarily mean more committees in a big centralised state. One problem I personally have with representative democracy is that the representative class will proliferate. If e.g. the railroad/community was organised as a co-op with special legislative constraints, you could have democratic oversight without these meaningless elections. Compulsory, random chance representation or coercive voting with a review by your successors are also mechanisms which could be explored. Even a well designed market could serve that purpose.

"more democracy" simply means we do not just give one dude (and it's still most often a dude) the keys to power and call it a day and instead think about how to distribute this power so that it stays functional enough to produce public goods, but smeared around finely enough that it's hard to abuse.