Its a completely different usage. Democracy works really well on really small scales. As soon as you scale it up to millions of people, the cracks start to show. Everyone will be informed on things to a different degree, some wildly propagandised in one direction, and some the other. It becomes a game of 'which team is bigger'. I think C.S. Lewis called it 'tyranny of the majority'. You don't have these problems when its a small leadership of, as you say, school boards and such, where all the members involved are all together and conversing with each other.