I doubt think that's true at all. In most representative democracies (UK here) we just don't have the ability to vote on such fine-grained legislation. If you asked the person in the street "should companies be held to absolutely strict truth in advertising for quantitative claims", once you explained what it meant (!), I'd warrant the vast majority would agree, yes they should.
It's anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist to allow misinformation on products. Markets can't optimise if you allow misinformation.
>If you asked the person in the street "should companies be held to absolutely strict truth in advertising for quantitative claims", once you explained what it meant (!), I'd warrant the vast majority would agree, yes they should.
This overestimates support because you're vague on what the policy actually is, so everyone thinks that it's going to be their preferred variant being implemented. See: the brexit vote which got a majority vote for "yes", but in reality the none of the individual proposals got majority approval.
If hypothetically 10% of the population said A but you slice up B into specific enough buckets then A wins even if the overwhelming majority dislike A.
Brexit was only a policy question if you combined two different questions. “Should we stay in the EU?” and “What kind of foreign policy should we have?” People answering Yes to the first question also had plenty of diversity in how they wanted to answer the second question.
> If hypothetically 10% of the population said A but you slice up B into specific enough buckets then A wins even if the overwhelming majority dislike A.
Yes, if you're only allowed to vote for a single option. If you're allowed to vote yes/no for each option, or rank them from best to worst, then this problem doesn't happen.
Well, you can ask your representative to represent you, right?
I live in a place with direct democracy and it's much less regulated than the UK. Therefore the link between having the ability and actually regulating more is not obvious to me.
> anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist to allow misinformation on products
Is it though? I mean, it might be bad, but I don't see how it's necessarily anti-democratic, as it has little to do with the governance model.
It's anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist to allow misinformation on products. Markets can't optimise if you allow misinformation.