It's rather elitist to say that more educated (AKA richer) citizens make "better" political decisions than less educated (AKA poorer) citizens. They both make decisions with relatively similar amounts of clarity in their respective class interests.
That's one hypothesis but there are many things it can't explain. We could compare African countries that were colonized to African countries that were not colonized. The hypothesis predicts a big difference but is there?
We could compare non-African countries that were colonized to African countries that were colonized. Hypothesis predicts a small difference, is there?
The kind of everybody is equal mentality that must underlie such a statement boggles my mind. It's an attitude that is shockingly disconnected from the real world. We may as well be talking about Santa Claus.
Typical issues that go to referendum in Switzerland range from the trivial (shall we raise taxes to build a new football stadium/road tunnel/etc), to the constitutional (should international treaties be able to override referendums... that one is running at the moment). In none of these cases is a decision so complex that it can't be understood by everyone in a short time.
Generally, I've found that anyone claiming a government-level decision is too complicated to explain to an average person is trying to cover up major weaknesses in the underlying arguments.
The kind of everybody is equal mentality that must underlie such a statement boggles my mind. It's an attitude that is shockingly disconnected from the real world
The extent to which people differ in their moral and intellectual potential is the defining difference that creates right wing vs left wing politics in basically any democratic society. Read Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" to get a very insightful analysis of why this is so. Far from being mind boggling, it's entirely expected that different people have different intuitions about the capability of the average person.
Reality is one way, and we build models of it in our minds to differing degrees of accuracy - the better your models the better you are equipped to make decisions in life. This applies to political decisions, major life choices, what you eat for breakfast.
Politicians are not only not very well versed in the fields they need to understand, they're sometimes purposefully ignoring it in order to do something popular among their voters. Direct democracy makes this a bigger problem - it turns into tyranny of the majority and there is no check on what is popular (in Switzerland there are actually a lot of checks, but I'm talking more in general here about Athenian style direct democracy.)
Imagine a direct democracy in France once they have a majority Muslim population - you could start to watch the freedoms we take for granted in the West being rolled back one at a time. And it's not that their ideas are equally as good as our Western ideas - not all ideas are equal, and I think despite being obviously biased, it's true for me to say that many of our ideas are superior.
If you had a direct democracy in South Africa, they would take all property from the rich and redistribute it. The country would promptly fall apart like Venezuela and Zimbabawe where similar things happened. In Switzerland I think people understand the ramifications of doing, what on the surface, sounds like a good thing.
Representative democracy doesn't save us from this at all (the scenario in South Africa looked like it would come to pass, and they reversed course under international pressure) but it may curb some of the worst excesses of a direct democracy.
If you take two 25 year olds, and one spent 7 years in the university system learning 'book knowledge', and one spent 7 years in industry learning via an apprenticeship (this sort of situation is common in Switzerland), then who is really more knowledgeable? What even is knowledge? Is knowledge obtained only from professors, or from managers and supervisors on the job, or practical experience, or a blend of all of these?
There's a reason the most famous successful tech CEOs in the USA seem to be college dropouts.
Democracy by itself is not necessarily a stable institution. In the absence of a strong social commitment to rule of law and an effective and disciplined state, it doesn't work. The path that some societies took to get to this state did involve education, and in particular literacy, to a fair degree.
Africa is a mess due to western imperialism but failed democracy is a different topic than that: because most societies started off in some kind of mess, either in disarray, or in a state of tyranny. We don't have any examples of states going directly from tribal societies to functioning democracies with rule of law in one, peaceable step. Looking only at the west, it took centuries of violent conflict.
The same is true if social policy -- it's easy to look at the voting decisions of people without college degrees as "stupid" and "uninformed", but I would challenge you to think about how their actions are just as informed and reasoned as people in your demographic, they just come to a different conclusion because of their economic and cultural background. "Education" is often a proxy for race or class in political discussions. I would argue that policy (and engineering) is much more about values than knowledge -- is housing a human right? Is healthcare a human right? Should the United States acknowledge and repair the damages of slavery and systemic racism? Should we accept asylum seekers? Everyone may have compelling, reasoned arguments to these questions, but it is naive to say only college educated specialists have the correct ones.
However (ignoring the ad hominem), I don't agree with your second point that a more education citizen will not necessarily make better decisions than less educated ones. Obviously everyone will make decisions that benefit themselves, but only with Education can someone understand the ramifications of their decisions in a broader context. Many political situations have little-to-no effect on an individual in the short-term, so making a decision (since it's not based on personal gain) must be based on something else. I would argue that something would be an individual's understanding of the impact on society in general - an understanding that a "good education" is supposed to cultivate.