Quora: http://www.quora.com/How-can-we-fix-government
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I need to disagree with all of the above, unfortunately. Government is not the elected representatives, 90% of the time. This is completely opposed to how things should theoretically be, but in the limited time I spent on Capitol Hill, I came to believe that reality does not match the theory.
First off, bills are written by staffers, not the elected officials. It's obvious if you think about it, but let's follow this chain a little bit. Who are the staffers? Generally, late 20s through mid 30s. Kids and young adults, basically, with little 'real world' experience. Most are Political Science or Communications majors, meaning they know how government 'works' but rarely about what they're governing. There are exceptions--like AAAS or NSF fellows--but they are exceptions, not the rule.
Lobbyist reform is important, but not for the reasons people list above. At worst, lobbyists working at the level described above tweak a bill around the edges. The health care bill is something like 1500 pages, right? At this point, lobbyist-driven deals are tweaking a few paragraphs. It's true that these minor changes can have major effects, BUT think about the staffers writing these bills.
You're 26, overworked, and your boss is demanding a policy paper on Net Neutrality. You've got 3 constituent letters that need to get approved that are being written by your interns. You're working on a constituent response piece dealing with an NRA mailer that dumped 150 angry letters in your boss's office. You're covering three other major topics--'science,' environment, and Veteran's Affairs, for example. You're getting this paper done--how? So you turn to a friend, who's working for a think tank that specializes in Net Neutrality. He or she gets you a bunch of pages that you tweak up to match your boss's position on the issue and deliver that to the Chief of Staff.
The end result: think tanks, lobbyist groups, and so on have immense power based on their specialization and the overworking of office staffers. Elected officials are primarily figureheads for the bureaucracy that has run the US government starting during the post-War period.
Long story short: if you want to improve government, increase the tools available to junior and senior staffers that will allow them to quickly sift through massive amounts of information, provide the context in which to understand issues that they were never trained in, and connect them with the constituents that they will affect to properly understand the status quo.
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is an excellent tool in this regard, but it's a tool of the 20th century. The staffers are (extremely) highly trained librarians, skilled at drawing connections between a variety of disparate issues and able to 'dive deep' in explaining the historical context of today's issues.
I'd personally like to see a hyperlinked database allowing staffers and everyday people to dive into the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and United States Code (USC) as you're writing up a bill to understand how the CFR or USC has evolved on the issue you're working to change. The purpose of new laws is to positively affect the status quo. I'd like to see a translation of legalese into CBO impact numbers section by section, and new IT should eventually make this possible.
PS - As a quick aside, elected officials generally focus on one or two issues that they'll focus on. Al Gore, for example, researched and wrote many of his speeches on issues of technology and the environment, according to one of his former staffers. I get the impression that this is pretty rare, though.
But I think the tendency to blame people alone is just as silly, or more so, than blaming the system. People are just people, if they're systemically bad it's a product of the systems that raise them (culture, society), so that shows another kind of system issue. If they're not systemically bad, yet things still aren't working "right", then the system is also to blame. Either way, some system is at fault. Either that or we're fundamentally ungovernable and should just give up. The other option is to assume that people need to be "fixed" and tell me please how exactly you go about doing that without China-style indoctrination and rigidity...
) is caused by, and a symptom of, the system being broke. I propose that the voter apathy is the problem that causes the system to appear broke. It is just the founding premise that we disagree on.