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Or remove the voting system at large. The necessity of electoral democracy in what comes to selecting governments is debateable. The role of mass-media is crucial, and as said yes, politician's react to opinions. If you ask anyone though, everyone will want more wage, and prior to elections, politicians often play for popularity. Again, the example given above. Unnecessary financial unstability results from the "game".
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Well I'm not particularly big on the idea of democracy and would only really support it in an extremely limited form (where officials are elected by mass vote but have very little power to effect large-scale change and play a primarilly adminstrative role more than a legislative one), but it depends what kind of system youre talking about. There are almost as many problems with having unelected officials as there are from having elected ones, but if you had a strong codified constitution and an educated populace then you could probably get by with some kind of heriditary aristocracy for a few hundred years until apathy ripped it apart.
That most people vote based almost entirely on egocentric and short-sighted criteria is true (the recent smoking ban arguments probably being one of the more blatent examples of this), but this is probably caused by a lack of education due to the fact that politicial philosophy and the general ability to think in terms of abstract principles arent really taught in schools. You cant really seperate the problems with the modern voting system from the fact that most people are educated to be stupid - people largely vote for things that benefit them in the short term because they dont really have the context necessary to evaluate their actions on a broader scale or from a historical point of view.
As I said though, the problems are complex and mutually reenforcing - you cant really isolate one factor and call it the cause. You have an electoral system which is built around superficiality and ignorance, a mass media which promotes superficiality and ignorance, and an education system which teaches people to be superficial and ignorant. With that sort of combination its not really surprising that the outcome of mass voting is somewhat less than ideal.