Miners vote for Gavin as the lead dev. If someone else comes along and convinces a majority of miners that Gavin sucks and they should mine on his fork instead, Gavin has been fired.
That is for that one coin, using the same logic on an altcoin if people decide to support it and its centralized and generally privately mined then they are voting for that system. I dont know why there is even a controversy over how public the mining is or should be since a coin lives and dies by its users thus every user gets a vote.