I always thought of it as more of an efficiency thing. Perhaps a bad analogy, but let's say I have a few hundred photos I took on vacation. Yes, I could store them all together in a single batch. However, grouping them with some kind of predetermined taxonomy can help make sense of things through the noise. In a similar fashion, elected officials, imperfect though they may be, consolidate the voices of many into the voices of a few. At a certain scale and across certain distances it does make sense.

I think it was somewhere here in Lemmy, but I saw a proposal of randomized government appointments akin to jury duty which I found quite fun. Good way to make sure the populace is smart because any of them may be called up.