They don’t need to. When the informed minority on an issue gets lazy, stupid or cynical, however, the system dies.
The difference can be used to bargain with incumbents to compensate for their current position, while installing a new type of government in its place that is better. It's a pretty hard problem but I don't think it's impossible. I'm pursuing this kind of thing in Finland presently.
I don't have traction at the moment for it but I'm looking for ways to do it actively. Low chance of success but I think nonzero. Maybe sounds crazy but I think drastic changed are needed anyway so why not try.
Anyway, this really needs an explanation of what your idea of "real democracy" is, and what "replace power" is supposed to mean.
Anyway, the answer to your question of "how" is likely: at your own peril. ;)
On what basis does someone make this claim? Authoritarianism is a broad stroke. Most of the time, they eliminate voting, not make it compulsory.
Classically, an authoritarian power only care about voting to initially take hold of power. Every attempt to coerce voting (one way or the other) after that is performative, not instrumental.
No, that is totally not true.
Even North Korea doesn't eliminate voting. People there still vote, just very controllable by the government. Compulsory voting is one of the instruments that makes voting more controllable for the government. Voting in North Korea is mandatory.
I don't consider this voting. After a regime has already taken power (during which time voting is suspended), there is often (not always) allowed performative ritual as a cultural placebo. Regulated physical acts are not the same as suffrage.
Like what?
Why not? Is it just that you have not experienced it, or is there a more principled argument?
My personal experience is that democracy feels to work much better in smaller (sub 10 million people) than larger, but it could also just be correlation not causation.
Let's ignore the "massification" of democracy (by which I mean entrenched power gaining leverage over the "demos" by targeting propaganda at the low-agency portion of the population, but this may be controversial?). Population scale has changed but Dunbar's number hasn't, and if the 0.1% of the population that is deeply invested in a topic manages to organize, there's a high likelihood that they can get critical reach. However, population scale has changed and Dunbar's number hasn't, so the first step of actually organizing 0.1% of the total population becomes a lot more difficult with scale.
Arguably, my distrust of modern democracy doesn't help, but I have no idea how anyone could manage to find and fish out 20k specific individuals from a pool of 20M people. And that's what needs to be done, IMO, not signing petitions (and in Canada, there's already a little bit of debanking-based chilling effect re: out-of-band political organization).