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Types of Regimes Trends Globally 2023
(lemmy.ca)
Source: https://v-dem.net/documents/44/v-dem_dr2024_highres.pdf page 7
I don't think people have a lot of agency in a liberal democracy. In my experience, the politicians tend to select their voters - via gerrymander and disenfranchisement and strategic GOTV.
Popular views are poorly represented, but the avenues for opposition are walled in by State and private police forces.
This sours people on what feels increasingly like a farce, and poisons popular opinion against the idea of a true functional democratic system.
Sure, a good autocracy will always be more effective and fairer than a good democracy. The greek already knew that.
They also knew that a bad autocracy will always be worse than a bad democracy.
And you have no idea what you will get with an autocrat, they change over time, they make new enemies out of you, what is good for some is bad for others...
So democracy is not just about giving people what they want or representing their views, it is about damage limitation between all the established "mafias" vying for power and a ruleset for peaceful evolution.
To make it worse, some modern societies hide de facto autocracy or oligarchy under democracy, which may sour you towards democracy.
The Greeks thought that. By actual empirical measures democracies do unambiguously better, beyond what can be explained by individual leaders. It comes down to autocracies never actually being one man rule, because the lower downs have their own agendas and palace intrigues, too.
The rest of my comment addresses that. The "good king" father figure does a lot of heavy lifting for autocracy in people's subconscious (even Plato's haha), but it is inevitable for a "benevolent monarch" with the mandate to "fix everything" to turn sour and abuse power, the variance of one single individual's performance and world iew is too high. Aristotle writes about some of this too.