The American system of government is not a representative democracy, but an elective plutocracy.
Somewhat less than 500 members of the ruling body of this country are popularly elected, and these members are selected from a very specific socio-economic class which is vastly different from the class of the electors. All Senators and Representatives must be wealthy enough both to afford to run a campaign (or influential enough to get the money from those who have it to give), and to maintain two residences: one in his or her native state, and another in or near Washington, D.C.. This is mandated by the Constitution itself.
Individual Americans who can afford to own a single home are statistically in the minority, and those who can afford two such homes are rare indeed. As the media has reminded us during Election 2000, Presidents are not elected by popular vote, nor are the literally tens of thousands of "civil servants". And as the gap between the upper and lower classes widens, with the steady decline of the middle class, the country's governing body gains more power and draws from an increasingly smaller representative sample of the population, until finally culminating in what political theorists call Anarcho-Capitalism; that is, rule by the laws of economics, pure corporate government.