Arguably, the chief historical improvements in living conditions have not been from voters having the influence to pass legislation which (they think) will benefit them, but, rather, from power-wielders becoming scared of doing anything too horrible to voters.
I'd say the chief historical improvements in living conditions are caused by improvements in technology.
Which is to say that political powers do make an attempt to court the voters, but not to a noticeably greater degree than they court, say, the agricultural industry.
They only court the agricultural industry because they can influence the voters. That said, the power they exert over the voters can hardly be called the power of the voters.
Another thing voters can do is vote for a third party. They don't win, but it takes away votes from whoever they would have voted for, and will make them try harder to get their vote later. I'm given to understand the Democrat party leaned toward the Green Party after the 2000 election due to this.
Today's post, The American System and Misleading Labels was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Two-Party Swindle, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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