But I know you know this, so are we at cross purposes over definitions?

if there's nothing but institutional shareholders, why do we pretend that the interests of shareholders somehow intersect with the interests of the voting public?

I took "interests" to mean "the desire/need for security of and return on savings" and the "voting public" to mean "average citizens". So my reply was, I thought, the practical point that most people do have interests that rely directly on the performance of shares, even if, legally, they're a step away from being shareholders themselves.

(That doesn't, obviously, make the current system any less rotten. More so, if anything.  But I don't think there is really any "shareholder class" separate from the rest of us whose genuine interests lie in an unsustainable fast buck. Apart from bonus-driven fund managers, that is.)