I feel like this is a complicated issue, because there are two competing values here.

On one hand, fair representation is important, and the idea that every person has an equal say in how governmental decisions are made. One person one vote.

On the other hand, not everyone has the same ‘skin in the game’ for different decisions. For example, if we are deciding if a noisy building should be allowed to be built, someone who lives 5 miles away is not going to be affected by the noise, so they aren’t going to care about that. If someone comes to a community and says “we will give everyone in the community $50 if you let us build this loud building here”, then all the people out of the noise range are going to think that is a great deal. They get $50, and they don’t hear the noise anyway. Why WOULDNT they want to approve that?

So is it fair for the community to decide to make one (or a few) people miserable for years so they get $50?

So things like public review that let a “concentrated local interest group” have more power makes some sense if the thing they are reviewing also has a concentrated local impact.

Of course, there has to be some balance, otherwise we will live in a NIMBY world and nothing will be built.

> normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.

That's not how the vast majority of this works, and the average best case scenario on this you get to vote a politician out after they already fucked people over.