well. On paper, we have a representative democracy
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Representative democracy (also indirect democracy) is a variety of democracy founded on the principle of elected officials representing a group of people, as opposed to direct democracy.[1]
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from wikipedia. depending on the scale of government, it works pretty well, local, regional, state, etc. At the national level, things are much more distorted. The representation that actually happens at the federal level does not seem very uniformly connected to the "will of the people". At that distance, the relative strengths of the influence of individual voter's will and the influence of "political/PAC/interest group/lobbying" will is usually unbalanced strongly in favor of political/PAC/lobbyist groups, for the simple reason that money buys access. A given representative can't really pay attention to the voices of 50,000 people, the kind of population that a US House of Representatives representative (catchy name, eh?) represents. They just can't. So, they pay attention to the loudest voices, and money is a megaphone for that. The situation is even more dramatically illustrated in the Senate. Really? One senator can hear and understand the unified voice of x million people in a given state? or, half the population in the state? Really? I don't think so. The same problem exists for the Executive Branch. Just look around, lots of people say President ______ doesn't represent me. It's sad.
Still, that's the system we have, even though the actions, indeed, even the elections of these people is distorted/warped/deformed by the undue influence of money (something businesses and other interest groups can generate far, far more easily than individual citizens can).
The result is a form of government that looks like a representative democracy but functions like an oligarchy/plutocracy at the federal level.
