When the Chartists, Britain’s first mass working class movement, formulated their demands back in 1838, they called for elections to be held annually.

The argument expressed in their People’s Charter was simple. If parliament were to reflect the popular will, the electors needed to express that will on a frequent basis.

For the radicals of the 19th century, democracy was – or should be – a participatory process, a system that involved as many people as possible, as often as possible.

Of course, that was a long time ago.

But it’s worth remembering the Chartists in light of Bill Shorten’s proposal for a referendum to introduce fixed four-year parliamentary terms (a plan for which Malcolm Turnbull has expressed in-principle support), if only because the contrast between then and now illustrates two very different attitudes to democracy.

For Shorten, for Turnbull and for a big chunk of the commentariat, fewer elections mean more reforms.

As the UNSW academic George Williams explained to the ABC, “I think here the argument is that maybe we’re going to get better government with actually a period of time to develop policy and ideas in a way that doesn’t often happen as it should at the moment.”

It’s a claim that possesses a particular force, given the dire state of political debate in the country.

Appearing on the ABC’s Insiders program, Bill Shorten reiterated the point.

“What this country needs is long-term policymaking,” he said. “Governments can be more daring and determined if they’re not constantly thinking about the next election.”

Yet what’s striking about the formulation is how it shifts responsibility from the politicians on to the people. If they’re not doing a good job, it’s our fault. We’re a needy, whiny bunch, who keep bugging them at polls, distracting them from the important statesmanlike business with which they’d otherwise be preoccupied.

Well, that’s a nice story but it doesn’t describe what’s happening.

Think of same-sex marriage, the debacle that best exemplifies our dysfunctional polity.

Are the masses really holding back idealistic politicians determined to introduce equality? Yeah, nah, as the kids say. After all, that particular mess only came into being because of parliamentary legislation (passed with bipartisan support in 2004) defining wedlock in heterosexist terms. Since then, popular support for marriage reform has steadily grown – but the sentiment’s never been expressed in the House of Representatives.

Equality will now, almost certainly, require a fresh election so as to sweep away the blockage presented by Canberra.

To put it another way, we’re not lumped with a homophobic marriage definition because too-frequent polls have distracted reform-minded MPs. On the contrary, we’re stuck with rotten laws because we haven’t had sufficient elections to change them.

Over the past decades, the neoliberal turn has consolidated the already existing tendency of the political class to understand governance as a matter of technocratic management: a business best left to the professionals.

Not surprisingly, voters themselves have become correspondingly disengaged from a parliamentary system in which they’re treated as at best an annoyance and at worst a problem.

Last year, the academics behind the ANU’s Australian election study reported that satisfaction with the political system had reached a record low, with Australian voters remarkably scornful of politicians, parties and the electoral process as a whole.

It’s a sentiment that, elsewhere in the world, has given rise to various kinds of radical populism: movements explicitly complaining that ordinary people were not being heard.

That’s what makes Shorten’s push for longer electoral terms such a strange political priority.

Recently, there’s been talk about the ALP channelling Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, via a new focus on inequality and social justice.

But where the Corbyn and Sanders campaigns stressed, to varying degrees, the traditional left emphasis on democratic participation, Shorten’s going out on a limb to make elections happen less often.

A proposal similar to the one he’s mooting went to a referendum back in 1988 and was then comprehensively defeated – and that was back during a time of much greater trust in politicians.

That’s why the Australian Institute’s Ben Oquist advocates fixed three-year terms, a reform probably more likely to get up, if only because it would be understood as removing power from MPs (by ending the PM’s ability to set the poll date) rather than the people.

But that in itself highlights the peculiarity of this particular moment.

In 1838, the Chartists declared that the solution to a broken system lay in mass democracy. Nearly 200 years later, we might not agree with the specific proposals they put forward. But there’s a remarkable consensus that something’s gone very wrong in the Australian body politic.

So where, today, are the voices demanding more participation, not less?