I'm a member of Goonswarm, both the largest alliance in EVE and the one whose reputation for meta-gaming might persuade you to think that we would use the CSM to give ourselves an advantage. While we openly admit to working as a group to get people into the CSM (we have enough votes to get 1-2 every time), as far as I know we haven't even tried to use it for our own political advantage because it would be almost impossible. What kind of change could we possibly propose that would benefit us over our enemies? Asking them to do something like improving the quality of the space we live in (which is the best in the game, anyway) would be transparent and silly. At best, we can (and do) ask them to fix some of the absolutely broken 0.0 mechanics such as POS setup times, titans, broken loot tables, among other things. eve isk While this does benefit us as an 0.0 alliance, all of our enemies are 0.0 alliances as well, so there is no real advantage gained. 0.0 alliances are not in direct competition with low-sec or empire alliances, so there is no advantage gained there, either. Of course, we also push for changes that affect the entire population, such as fixing broken ship types (probably half are worthless) and general balance tweaks (ewar springs to mind as the recent example).

I'm not saying that we wouldn't exploit the CSM for our own gain, but it just doesn't have the potential for doing so.