Republics have been tried, from time to time, within some city of dath ilan: people making group decisions by voting to elect leaders who make those decisions.  It can work if you try it with fifty people, even in the most unstructured way.  Get the number of voters up to ten thousand people, and no amount of helpfully-intended structure in the voting process can save you.

(More than one thing goes wrong, when 10,000 people try to directly vote on leaders for their polity.  But if you had to pick one thing, it would be that voters don't individually have enough time to figure out which strangers they should vote for or why.  When they start to refer their votes to purported experts and specialists, who are also strangers, the politics that develop there are removed from them as individuals.  There is not much of a sense of being control, then, nor are the voters actually in control.)

Republics have been tried, from time to time, within some city of dath ilan: people making group decisions by voting to elect leaders who make those decisions.  It can work if you try it with fifty people, even in the most unstructured way.  Get the number of voters up to ten thousand people, and no amount of helpfully-intended structure in the voting process can save you.

(More than one thing goes wrong, when 10,000 people try to directly vote on leaders for their polity.  But if you had to pick one thing, it would be that voters don't individually have enough time to figure out which strangers they should vote for or why.  When they start to refer their votes to purported experts and specialists, who are also strangers, the politics that develop there are removed from them as individuals.  There is not much of a sense of being in control, then, nor are the voters actually in control.)