Anything that increases the number of the deciding vote group in relation to the whole should improve things in the long run, because the more people those who are in power have to answer to, the more (time, resources, effort, etc.) they'll spend on appeasing the group of people that put them in power. The smaller the deciding vote group is (whether it's a democracy, where this number tends to be larger, or a dictatorship, where it's usually smaller) the more likely it is that the people in power will only work to satisfy that group - in it's simplest, rawest form, these are often bribes. In larger groups, these are generally government policies that benefit the larger group. The bigger the group, the more likely it is that these policies will be both reasonable and beneficial to all in the short run.
Anyway, the bigger the group is, the more people they'll be forced to satisfy to stay in power. So changes would have to be made in the way we elect our officials, in order to increase this deciding number. It will happen eventually, it's just that we would hope that it happens in our lifetime, and not after, say, another millenium spent in a dark age akin to what happened after the fall of Rome.
Modern communication makes this more apparent, and eliminates a lot of the problems we would have had in the past with this. Ultimately, I believe education is the key- not always formal, but at least a dissemination of pertinent information about how things work in layman's terms.
All praise the internets.
