The real problem IMO is that the political parties aren't able to really influence what way the world moves anymore. It's now mostly in the hands of technology and it's tendency to force change no matter who gets exposed to it.
I wrote many years ago that technology is like a tsunami which can't be stopped. The only thing we can do is learn how to surf the wave.
My impression is that this kind of general dissatisfaction with government is more a result of the globalism brought about by technology, rather than the technology itself.
I think the reason governments end up doing things people don't want, even before you consider blatant corruption, is that global companies are too important for individual economies to ignore. So governments end up in a race to the bottom to attract global business.
Any country, company, organisation who is not using technology and trying to catch up the to progress of it is loosing. Any country, company and organization who is trying to catch up is seeing itself needing less and less to do the same things.
Technological jobs are more or less the only jobs that pays really well and have some sort of a future and anyone who want to make money in todays economy have to use technology to scale their business even if it means undermining their own value.
The companies who are really transformative today and disrupting aren't just disrupting industries they are disrupting the legal system.
Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, self driving cars, drones all push the legal boundaries politicians are represented by special interest groups, these are at odds with the advantages tech brings to consumers.
AI in pushes the need for humans to relearn at an ever increasing speed sooner or later we can't re-educate ourselves fast enough.
Globalization is a byproduct of technology, we can't not have globalization if we want progress, countries who don't want progress aren't going to be able to compete with countries who do.
There are of course many other factors than just technology but it's my belief that today technology is at the core of any human progress. Without it we can't progress and and so we have no choice other than one that ultimately leads to our extinction. Technology is natural. It's part of evolution. If we don't adapt we perish.
Well, China is doing "great" with its Great Firewall to keep citizens in check, despite the technology advance. Many more countries are following this idea and I'm sure we will see more "Great Firewalls" upcoming in few years.
V = pB − C + D
Italy and Greece don't have FPTP voting but people there feel pretty disenfranchised even if they theoretically have more representation in government than an American or Canadian would.
In the last 20-30 years there has been an attempt to move Italy to a two party system, first with an almost purely FPTP electoral law, then with a proportional system with large majority bonus and minimum thresholds.
The results have been an unmitigated disaster. Not only the two party system didn't materialize, major parties have disintegrated, and the population has felt increasingly disenfranchised and participation has been falling down election after election. The electoral law and constitution have been tweaked so many times that now, in a perfectly bicameral system, is is pretty much impossible to get the same majority on both chambers.
Among modern democracies, there is a very strong positive effect of proportionality of results produced by the electoral system and all of electoral participation, degree of satisfaction with government, and number of supported dimensions of public policy debate. It's certainly not the only factor, but it's a clear, strong factor. See, e.g., Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.
Currently, attendance at most precincts/wards/etc. in both Democratic and Republican parties is fractions of a percent of eligible voters. This yields the emergent behavior you see today: the ones controlling the levers of political parties are the "true believers" who simply showed up, and as an aggregate tend towards more extreme positions. It is Yeats' "the centre cannot hold" and "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" come to life.
Not everyone who shows up even needs to spend all that much time participating at the precinct level. Just enough to send onwards to the next level of the party machinery those you trust to vote similarly-enough to your own interests. It works out to about 2-3 hours per year at most: you mount an effective DDOS upon the party establishment, then go home if you want. Say you spend about another couple day's worth of due diligence each year to suss out who you vote to send onwards to the next level of participation.
Participating at the higher levels of both parties' machinery takes more time and adds money to the requirements, but not all that much in the grand scheme. To represent a county-level/senatorial-district-level/etc. at a state convention, generally about the highest most people will get within a handful of years of starting participation, is once every two years spend 4 combined days in a couple major cities in your state, split into a one-day and a 3-day meeting spread across several months. If you pack your own meals or similar (grocery store run and cook your own), drink only water, drive to the cities, and stay with a bunch of like-minded citizens who split the tab on a house-share, usually about a day's worth of accumulated logistics organizing, about $120-200 total expenditures. If you eat out, order drinks out, stay at a hotel and do some tourist activities, about $600+. The state conventions do fall on a weekday, so you'll give up a vacation day once every other year. Say you spend another couple hours a week discussing and reading about issues of the day, so call it about 17 8-hour days every year of participation.
However, not many people really know how this all works, and give up within 2-3 years of participating. They think that showing up, organizing and kibbutzing with like-minded citizens for a year or two should yield perceivable results. It realistically takes closer to 10-20 years of sustained effort, starting only from the year where the numbers are on your side. The Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders supporters learned this lesson to their disappointment. Most who attend for the first time do not cotton on that they need to show up, find enough like-minded to effectively caucus, study how the current leadership maintains and loses their power in their internecine knife fights, devise their own strategy and tactics, then make their bid to seize power of the leadership posts, a process that takes many years, failures, and setbacks that teach along the way.
Politicians are money-driven because most voters' civic duty starts and stops at voting (when in an active civic civilization, casting a vote is actually the endpoint of an involved process), and most voters are highly susceptible to media-based messaging in such a low-information decision-making environment. Politicians pay more attention to giant majority voting blocs over money; no amount of money can win against overwhelming votes of aware citizens.
We simply don't have enough aware citizens.