E.g. the UK is seen as a “democracy”

It’s basically as bad as USA, and also a dysfunctional democracy. They even had the chance to change that in a public vote, and the idiots voted against it!!

A FAIR democracy is a democracy where all interest groups can have representation, although you typically have a lower limit of 2-5% vote to get representation.
And where every vote is counted equally, so a vote in 1 end of the country counts as much for representation as a vote in the other end.
And representation is according to the populous vote and nothing else.

My perspective is that I don’t see democracy as any more virtuous than authoritarianism as a political system when elected officials aren’t serving the people’s interests.

Well technically it isn’t really a democracy then, because their job is to serve their constituents.
Of course the worse the democracy the more that can be the case. And USA is a very bad democracy.
Still even that was way better than not having democracy until the Republicans went full blown sociopathic, and was still rewarded government power.
Something I suspect will only happen in a very bad democracy without equal democratic representation by minor parties.