The voters as a whole might make horrible decisions locally (hello, Iraq war), but in the long run they mostly end up doing what's right. Even if only because our notion of 'right' is shaped by what they did.
But do they though?* Or is that just something we tell ourselves as small-D democrats, to stave off uncomfortable questions about the rightness of our beliefs? The same way that devout Christians will say that "God has a plan" as a way of dealing with horrible things, because the alternative (that the universe is capricious and uncaring) isn't healthy for the sanity.
*This is an honest-to-God question. Anybody know if there have been any studies done on outcomes of voter-based decisions like ballot initiatives? I suppose the problem is that without a series of alternate universes to observe, it's tough to compare outcomes.
In terms of 'intelligent decision-making'?
Eh. It averages out, when you have sufficient separation to keep hysteria/mob rule out. Sometimes a single person who just say 'Just fucking do it, dipshits' would be better, sometimes they're telling you to build the seventeenth palace this week, you disgusting piece of slightly-different-ethnicity trash.
In terms of stability of government, willingness to peacefully abide by outcomes of power struggles, and overall progress?
Much better. And by overall I do mean in the extreme long-term. Not like, twenty-year scale, but, like, century-scale. Individual rulers can go wherever the fuck they want. But councils and voting have been a part of human government for a very long time, for a reason. Giving the vote to everyone was a new thing, but still...
I still wonder if maybe the age to vote shouldn't be 25 or so, since that's about when the forebrain is supposed to finish developing. Might slow 'progress' (in the general sense of the term since who knows where it'll go next) down, obviously, since youngsters tend to be the ones pushing for it, and wouldn't necessarily actually help at all, but I dunno.
But yeah basically the thing with democracy (or democratic republics, I should say; Athens didn't turn out all that well from what I remember) is that it gives so many chances for things to be noticed and corrected. There's an awful lot of room for error. Like, fuckin' Hitler? He conducted a very specific campaign of targeted genocide, in the industrialized era, and took power in a democratic country after the groundwork was set by the treaty of Versailles and all that jazz.
In the medieval era, that would've been jack shit where extermination of populations was a regular thing that rulers conducted. Oh, that town we just took is being uppity? Yeah, burn it down, put the inhabitants to the sword, salt the earth for, oh, a dozen leagues around? That should serve as a decent enough example, I figure. The only real difference with the Nazis being that instead of it just being tied to location, it was targeted via lineage and blood testing of all citizenry, whereas in the middle ages that would only happen to nobles, or to peasants based on where they lived. I mean, except in, like, Spain and everyone thinks of the Inquisition as this awful and terrible thing anyway.
Point there being that it's hard to get democracy to fail that spectacularly. Whole system basically has to be shaped for it. In dictatorships or feudalism, all you need is one dude. And sure, you can get rid of the dude(or dudette, in some cases). But there can always be another one. In democracies, the media remembers the dude very well, and thus does the populace. And when it's the populace, not chance, determining who it is, they can specifically steer away from that.
@Mainiac: More oversight=better. The basic voting populace is also a means of oversight. I mean, hell, man, weren't you pointing out how Politifact was finding
Trump to be the one lying far more often than Clinton, and that she was actually really honest, and that therefore Trump is a fearmonger who doesn't know what he's talking about? Like, is fact-checking only good when it agrees with the conclusions you've already come to? I'm not trying to be rude here, I'm really not, I'm really just wanting to know if you've noticed this sort of switchback in your debating. I'm not trying to accuse you of anything except at the most, motivated reasoning, which is something we all have to struggle against, since it happens in the subconscious as much as anything else.