It seems very clear to me that the feedback loop is utterly broken in all democracies.
Two big reasons:
1: It's incredibly difficult to judge the effects of an elected leader's actions. Even assuming an educated/informed/engaged populace, there's nearly always an extremely long delay between an elected leader's actions and the results of those actions.
2: Even when the results of the actions are very tangible, it's still extremely difficult to assign credit or blame for the outcome.
A prime example would be the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Americans can tangibly experience the outcome of the ACA and form their own opinions. However, the final product is objectively quite different from what Obama and the Democrats initially wanted.
So if you think the ACA turned out pretty well (or poorly), to whom do you ascribe the credit (or blame)? To the Democrats for pushing the idea, or Republicans and the healthcare industry for scaling back its initial ambitions? To make an informed decision here you need to know "how the sausage was made" and you're also comparing the actual outcome versus a number of hypothetical roads not taken.
It just avoids perpetuating leadership that gets too
misaligned with a large share of the population.
I think,
at best, in America we've basically just achieved a kind of schizophrenic perpetual see-saw between parties that has almost nothing to do with how effectively either one governs. Which is I guess slightly better than having one party perpetually in power forever, but is not great.
It precludes any kind of long-term thinking, or stable relationships with other nations.