Just for fun, add one more variable - what if people took no interest in politics, stopped voting, and also stopped paying taxes?
Every government depends upon legitimacy, namely that people should continue to work, pay taxes, and perform civic duties. Without this legitimacy, people would simply stop obeying any of the laws, and the profound expense of "putting a gun to everyone's head" would lead to an immediate collapse. You can see this in nearly every collapse of a government in history; at the end there is a dramatic increase in taxes (or inflation, like the Zimbabwe collapse) to pay for police forces, but the higher taxes erode public confidence that much faster.
If voting were to cease, a "democratic" government would not have any legitimacy, which would ultimately undermine, not enhance its power. Any policy is seen as being created by a small cabal of individuals who have little connection to ordinary citizens, and as such opposing that policy is no longer "opposing yourself." Imagine a "vote" in which 2% of people vote, the winner carries votes from 1.1% of the population, but 20% of people quit paying taxes and 40% of people are buying guns. There is certainly a "vote" happening, just not at the ballot box.
Further thoughts...
In autocratic regimes legitimacy comes from the idea that governing authorities have some sort of special enlightenment to rule that others do not have. 207
This might be of a religious or non-religious nature, with the latter appearing often in Communist regimes. It boils down to "they know better than I do."
In modern democracies this legitimacy comes from the idea that your vote allows you to have a say in how the government operates, and on the flip side, that all elected officials were chosen by the people, and therefore what they do is really just an expression of what the voters want. So to oppose a democratically elected government is to "oppose yourself."
Where this gets interesting, of course, is when a government goes on the same course regardless of who is elected. This would break the idea that your vote has any effect. Or, if no one votes, a politician cannot claim to represent the people, because "the people" didn't choose him, just the 2-3% of political hacks who make up the parties.
At this point the only winning move is to start behaving more like an autocratic regime, and perhaps start some agencies which give large amounts of funding to academic leaders, who in turn act as cheerleaders for the regime. This would give the regime the appearance of being "enlightened" because all of the "enlightened academics" would be backing them with "scientific proof." 274