That's an interesting train of thought about incentives. I would have said that everyone has an inherent motivation to understand, but now that I think about it, this motivation goes away when group dynamics or poverty start affecting you. Democracy works as long as the majority is lucid, I think. There's no alternative when it's not though. Create financial accountability for long term impact of ruling class decisions? That probably has a million downsides.
My view is that one way to improve the situation is to move as much power as possible to a local level. Quicker feedback loop, getting to know people you vote for, seeing them work for the community could improve things.
I think it's no coincidence that the healthiest democracies are either very small mono cultural countries or ones with a lot of power at local level while universal tendency of power hungry autocracs is to centralise as much power as possible while starving local bodies. One example is absolutely disastrous rules of PiS in Poland for the last 8 years.