The voting is Tribal. It doesn’t matter that the person you elect will starve your children and euthanise your parents so long as the ruler is part of your own tribe/clan/family/race/whatever. That is why democracy can’t work, or at least does not give the results westerners expect when tried in traditional cultures that have the family or clan as the basic unit of society rather than the individual. Democracy such as we had here requires a population that started out as individuals, people leaving their society and their family connections for new uninhabited and less accessible land (I am not going to argue about Indians etc.) That is how Switzerland began and the USA. The only countries that have had democratic structures more or less successfully imposed on them are countries that have been utterly defeated in war that has destroyed their whole social structure. South Korea is sort of an anomaly probably due to the inherent industriousness of Koreans. They had a non bloody revolution and threw out a domestic and very corrupt ruling class typical for the traditional family and clan based society that it is and did not replace it with more of same but got themselves a vibrant Democracy.
Thanks Arthurus. Good food for thought.