Surely it's unrealistic to expect most people to have either (a) the intellectual ability to understand significant issues, or (b) the leisure with which to undertake the time required to become adequately informed? Surely also, as politicians everywhere now know the easiest way to harvest votes is to tell infantile lies to simple-minded people, there's actually no point at all in educating oneself about the issues of the day. Because nobody cares. In fact, representative democracy is systematically structured to ignore the votes of the intelligent and informed, because there are far too few such people (and always will be, for the reasons alluded to above) to matter. Conversely the great mass of ignorant foolish people is where any aspiring politician must focus, because that's where 99% of the votes are. Furthermore, the idea that when one votes for Candidate Y because of his/her policies this means those policies will actually be implemented is, to be charitable, naive in the extreme. Representative democracy is a system where the ignorant and foolish vote for the incompetent and mendacious, who use policy (when they even bother, which is less and less frequent these days) rather as a magician uses misdirection.

Instead of imagining that tinkering around the edges will make any difference to a completely broken system we should instead be looking for a far more adequate approach to decision-making that is far better suited to our complex interconnected world.