Democracy happens, it's just rather indirectly related to voting. The coin of political power is public passivity - a resisting public will seriously ruin a pol

Democracy happens, it's just rather indirectly related to voting. The coin of political power is public passivity - a resisting public will seriously ruin a politician's day, democratic or autocratic. Elections have the effect of forcing politicians to rely on public opinion to create passivity, because using terror in the authoritarian style would get them ejected. Therefore democratic politics consists of efforts to push (or be pushed by) public opinion. (This democracy/autocracy contrast recurses to population subsets, cf: the civil rights era.)