HIVE

This topic may need the moderation of the tower, but I'll tell you what I think: in a democracy that exceeds the size of a block of flats it is inevitable that not everyone involved will be 100% competent on everything that the democracy needs to rule upon.
I think that, in democracies, representation by political formations of the individual voters is key to make them work. Alternatively, to keep it a democracy, no representation (which is known as direct democracy) would mean people would constantly be called to directly decide on things they don't know.

Big numbers require representation for there to be democracy. The key is to have a political system that does a good job of representing its voters.
I share your concern that the spectacularization of the electoral moments transforms a voter's sane choice of what political formation best represents him/her into something akin to judging a theater show where one chooses his favorite actor.

I share the concern of the degeneration of democracy into demagogy. I don't think that throwing away democracy is the answer though (i believe that it is the way that brought europe to the horrors of ww2).

The answer for me is to recover the role of ideology. I don't want to vote mr.Y or ms.Z because one is funnier than the other in a tv show or on social media memes.
I want to vote, but for political formations that stick to one set of ideas I can at least partially agree to.

And for single individuals spouting golden promises about my taxes or my job, but devoid of any ideology guiding their future rule, for these kind of politics I won't vote.

Find an idea, find those who represent it politically. Vote those. Participate to their debate if you feel competent. Don't trust cheap political salesmen.

Thanks for your response,

I actually meant that I dislike solely the voting system, not democracy as a whole; even if I gathered enough knowledge on one field to gain the confidence to form a public stance on it, say tax law, I would most likely possess lacking knowledge on another field.

I don't see the reason why not hold individual elections for each field in politics, in which case I would hesitate less to cast my vote. Let's consider a situation where the citizens voted unanimously: if there are n fields of decision making and m collections of values and norms, you'd currently cover m permutations, but with aforementioned system you could theoretically reach m^n permutations. Less in practice, as per-field norms and values would overlap among political parties.

Just jumping in; one of my biggest issues has simply been our *method* of voting. This is something I studied a bit in school but really studied a bunch myself (crazy, right?), when I really got into Hive Contests (Hosting them & such); I really am disenfranchised with the standard "FPTP", "one-vote" method of voting. It encourages all sorts of nasty repercussions like tactical voting, and doesn't really reflect the will of the people in most situations.
For a looooong time I've been a proponent of ranked voting, or preferential voting; there's lots of literature about it, but one of the most succinct was a series of videos on Youtube by "CCPGrey" (I think).