Yes. It's fixable the moment the public realizes that it is within their power to fix.
OTOH, systems with greater proportionality in representation also tend to have higher public opinion of how well the local government works, which is probably not coincidental; for a good general survey, see Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.
Maybe they tend to, but when they drew that graph, Italy is definitely an outlier. People are not at all fond of how the government works, putting it mildly!
Very proportional systems have large problems of their own too, including all the "horse trading" that goes on to form a coalition. This can and does involve a party that got, say 10%, driving a very hard bargain with the party that got 45%, giving far more relative weight to the people who voted for the 10% party.
You're right that the media is not The Problem, no argument there.
Granting that, why bring Italy up them?
> Very proportional systems have large problems of their own too, including all the "horse trading" that goes on to form a coalition.
Horse trading goes on to form a winning coalition in two-party systems, too (the major parties in electoral systems that create a two-competitive-party dynamic are, invariably, coalition parties); the difference is that, in such systems, the disporportionate power of the needed-to-win segment is less than in two-party systems, because its much easier -- because the factions are formal parties that you can negotiate with -- to swap coalition partners and form a new majority coalition if a minor partner wants too much.
(That's also, really -- outside of systems like the US where you've got an FPTP electoral system forcing pre-election coalition building -- a bigger issue in unitary parliamentary systems vs. separation of powers systems -- because having a majority coalition in parliament is a more significant issue in unitary systems whereas in separation of powers systems, ad hoc coalitions on particular issues can function in the legislature without requiring a stable "ruling" coalition in the legislature. So, if you are looking at an FPTP separation of powers system like the US, its a problem that moving to a proportionally-elected but still separation of powers system alleviates rather than making worse.)
Because I live here and it's a very good example of proportional systems not being strictly better than what we have in the US.
> swap coalition partners and form a new majority coalition if a minor partner wants too much.
Easier said than done in many cases.
Today there are so many people who have this weird belief that somehow the lack of change due to their extreme apathy is a justification for that apathy. It's not. If more people spent the time to educate themselves deeply on issues and candidates. If more people spent the effort to have legitimately worthwhile political discussions instead of merely agreeing with those who already agree with them and shouting down those who don't. If more people decided to take the risk and enter politics. Things would be a whole lot different.
Today the biggest problem isn't entrenched power structures, or gobs of money in political campaigns, or the lack of good candidates. All of those are symptoms. The biggest problem is that the primary ways that people learn about and discuss political issues are horribly broken. Most major news media outlets are horrid, only a few steps away from outright tabloid journalism. People decry fox news all the time but CNN and even the New York Times are, on the whole, little better, just different flavored output from fundamentally the same machinery. And people don't tend to realize this because every once in a while there will be something of legitimate quality that leaks through, and that event will serve as a rationalization for continuing to feed from those sources of information. These are precisely the same processes that keep people attached to religious institutions as well.
Ask yourself, how much effort do you, personally, put into researching political issues and candidates? What about your friends? Do you hold them to account for being low information voters? Do you ever have serious, non-shouting, political discussions with people who have different views than your own?
Example: I used to work for BigCorp. BigCorp had a PAC to which they would gently encourage employees contribute. They ran an annual contribution campaign, sent emails, made phone calls, etc. It was not mandatory, just encouraged. Many employees did so. The PAC in turn contributed to any politician who supported BigCorp.
So the net result is a bunch of people who ended up contributing to politicians who they otherwise may not have supported, and they did so out of a vague fear that doing so was important for their jobs. There was strong social pressure at work in this situation. I.e., left to themselves, these people would not have given a dime to these politicians.
The PAC in turn, spoke on behalf of these people, but only about issues that BigCorp cared about, not the issues the original donors cared about.
And that's why them is not us.
Lobbyists are unregulated employees or contractors, whose budget is only limited by the largesse of the sponsor. Its goal is to affect legislation and regulation through swaying the votes and actions of elected officials, political appointees and to a lesser extent career bureaucrats. In this regard they are limited by anti-corruption and bribery laws.
Campaign finance is a highly regulated system through which politicians amass money to fund campaign to sway the votes of the public. PACs and other organizations channel money to candidates whom they believe will be sympathetic to their causes.
Regardless, forget about the PAC money and the campaign finance. I assume BigCorp has lobbyists, and those lobbyists look out for BigCorps interests. As an employee of Big Corp, you are a beneficiary of those lobbyists.
As to your last statement, largely it is the shareholders and executives who are the beneficiaries of the lobbying they do. You can argue that the employees are beneficiaries in the sense that they have a job, but that misses the point: the benefits of lobbying fall asymmetrically. Again, it's a leverage thing. They leverage the desire of the little guy to have a job and raise his family and in turn reap huge rewards for the shareholders. So although you can say everyone benefits and gets what they want, the result is really a distortion of power and influence.
Of course new movements are under resourced. If it was easy to make that kind of change, it would already be done!