Considering the relative lack of information many people have when entering the booths (just from my experience in America. Please edit if I'm wrong), why do developed countries prefer democracy over other forms of government, which can work just as well if not better?
Is there a particular benefit to democracy over other forms of government?
Note: the definition of developed countries is taken from Wikipedia. Here
The question is a bit too broad to be answered for real, but i'll give a small attempt.
Democracy is the only known stable equilibrum in politics - or as close to it as we can get, due to the fact that:
There usually is no great concentration/imbalance of power
There are stable(ish) ways to respond socially/economically/politically to changes in the environment.
"Developed" country is defined on Wikipedia as:
A developed country or "more developed country" (MDC), is a sovereign state that has a highly developed economy and advanced technological infrastructure relative to other less developed nations. Most commonly the criteria for evaluating the degree of economic development is gross domestic product (GDP), the per capita income, level of industrialization, amount of widespread infrastructure and general standard of living
Due to the nature of democracy, when the environment changes, you have a chance to adapt to, either from the top (by electing people who aren't as wrongheaded) OR from the bottom (by simply doing things because you have the power - witness Internet economy.
In any other form of government, you either have to hope the dudes at the top (who for most of human history obeyed the Peter Principle, and even the good/smart ones are usually not smart enough for complex modern systems of today's economy/technology) get things right, OR, have a violent regime change to get rid of the ones who don't get things right. The former rarely happens; the latter isn't very conductive to economy, infrastructure OR general standards of living.
Generally speaking, the reason so many developed countries are democracies is due to peer pressure from other developed countries.
100 years ago, many of the "developed" countries were monarchies.
35 years ago the Soviet union was considered to be "developed", but they didn't really have that much of a democracy.
But right now the current trend is toward democracy to the point where some actually include it in the definition of "developed", and in developed countries, people generally have better access to information, and the idea of self rule might appeal to them.
For a completely different viewpoint, think of it not as 'developed countries favor democracy' but rather as 'social structures that facilitate democracy also improve economic development'.
General freedom facilitates entrepreneurship and trade. Stability (i.e., power changes w/o violence) promotes private investment, while risk of future oppresion motivates movement of wealth and best educated people abroad. Well functioning and mostly fair court system facilitates economic trust and growth. Autocracies tend to degenerate to nepotism and kleptocracies, which are a huge drain on economy. Social equality and inclusion allows maximal use of all human resources. Freedom of press and whistleblowing allows to identify and remove bad policies even when they're beneficial to some authorities.
It doesn't always work, naturally, but in general there is a positive causal relationship between all these factors and becoming a [more] developed country; and these are also the exact factors that differentiate "democracies" that simply have some formal elections and democracies that actually function mostly democratically.
To answer the question, I have a first hand experience. I was born and raised in the former soviet system. We lived in constant physical fear. All I wanted was to get democracy. Then we got it. But my eyes just started to open. Because in fact, what we got was not democracy, but capitalism. So why do we who live in developed countries favor democracy:
So by the time you get democracy, you realize it was just a dream of being able to appoint leaders who will then make sure the people's will be done. Unfortunately, leaders appointed will only want their own interest to be important. You also realize that capitalism overshadows democracy, and it will have effects on how you can defend yourself in a civil lawsuit for example. Democracy cannot exist without legal equilibrium, so as long as a rich person can buy better quality legal help, there is no democracy. Also democracy needs a form of possibility to submit petitions by the people. This does not work in the US, just in Europe, and it is a huge help for equalizing the elite's power.
I would say the western developed countries prefer democracy because it is the result of a historical evolutionary/revolutionary process that took thousands of years to perfect while fighting against monarchs, emperors, dictators, dogmatic clergy, etc.
