> Democracy is by far the most common style of governance

"Democracy" is a meaningless buzzword that is usually thrown around when a Western country wants to kill people and steal things. It is defined as us and the people we support. Meanwhile, two weird little private clubs choose all of the people who go up for election in the US at every level (and have created laws and conventions preventing this from ever changing), and public opinion has absolutely no detectable affect on public policy.

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595

> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

Democracy seems to you like a meaningless buzzword because it's won so thoroughly. You're evaluating whether average citizens have independent influence, because the question of whether they have influence at all is completely uninteresting; who cares whether the majority can band together and vote a guy out of office if the "powers that be" control his replacement? But most guys for most of history did not agree that anyone should be allowed to vote them out of office!