There have been many comments recently about the disconnect between the will of the people and the behavior of their representatives. One of the most common claims is that government is becoming undemocratic or is in the grip of some special interests.
Some people (including me) have made suggestions about how to correct this condition. Fixing things first requires an understanding of the real problem: democracy doesn't work.
The US founding fathers understood the problem and tried to add several layers of government to temper the biggest problem with democracy - the tyranny of the majority. I'll give a simple example from the local level. During various stages of the business cycle governments sometimes find themselves with a revenue surplus. They have several options: put the money into a rainy day fund, spend on expanded services, or cut taxes. Most often if the choice is put to the citizens as a vote they chose to cut taxes. The other choices benefit those in the future, not those currently paying taxes. And as I like to say: the unborn don't elect any representatives. So, the majority, votes for a, possibly unwise, policy which ends up costing more later. This is the tyranny of the majority.
We have seen many other cases especially in the area of civil or personal rights. One of the most egregious was the internment of 100,000+ Japanese-Americans during WWII. There are many other cases of political and ethnic discrimination being made law by the majority at the expense of a minority.
Governments have been set up to try and minimize the effect. There are various levels of government with limited authority, thus diffusing the power. Elections are staggered so that representatives are replaced slowly and regionalism is minimized by having at large elections. Spending authority is delegated to special purpose agencies which are, in fact, undemocratic. This ranges from large scale efforts like the Tennessee Valley Authority, or the NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority, down to local pollution and water control boards.
Constitutional limits have also been created so that changing government structure or fundamental rights is made difficult. This has been mostly successful in the US, but didn't prevent the passing of the Prohibition amendment, for example. This poorly thought out policy was a failure at achieving its objectives and actually led to a rise in corruption and organized crime. The effects are still being felt 80 years later in the current illegal drug trade which got its start at the time.
While the number of foolish, or anti-democratic amendments has been limited at the federal level, things are not quite so benign at the state level. In the US, California has led the way in passing new changes, many by use of popular referenda, which bypassed all of the institutional checks that were put in place to slow this process down. As a result California has had to live under various fiscal policies having to do with tax collection that have slowly damaged the ability to respond to growing population and the need for increased government spending. Other states are now following, most with changes designed to impose particular moral viewpoints on everyone. The lessons of Prohibition have not been learned by these people. You can legislate behavior, but not human nature.
So, democracies can be dictatorships of the majority, and there is nothing that can be done about it, if the people chose to sweep aside the checks built into the system. This is the ugly truth about democracy, and there is little that can be done about it.