LiquidDemocracy

Democracies usually are thought to come in two flavours :

• Direct, where everyone votes on every decision
• Representative, where everyone votes for a representative who makes decisions on their behalf.

Both have problems.

Direct democracy has the problem of tractability and resources. To quote OscarWilde yet again : SocialismTakesTooManyEvenings.

In any society, the number of decisions is huge, and everyone making them takes too much time. Also, not everyone has the time to educate themselves on the implications.

A few representatives can make the decisions, and can take time to become specialists.

Representative democracy has an opposite set of problems. What if after you've selected your representative they prove to be incompetent or dishonest or otherwise don't make the decisions you expected them to make when you selected them?

A *liquid democracy" is intended to give you something between these two extremes.

Each voter has an explicit vote on each decision but can delegate some of those decisions to others to make on their behalf. But in a *fungible" way, where bundles of decisions can be sliced and dicing in any way that each voter prefers.

For example, a voter can choose a new representative to make decisions for them every month or every week or every day. Adjusting the granularity of trust to suit their taste. Or a voter can delegate their votes on the economy to one representative, and decisions on international relations to another.

Furthermore, such delegations can be "recursive" or "transferable". Eg. I delegate my decisions to Tom this week, but he in turn can delegate them to Sam. Who now wields three votes instead of just one.

But if tomorrow I decide I didn't like Sam's use of my vote today, I can take it back and either use it directly myself or find another delegate.

Obviously, to be this "liquid" requires a lot of bureaucracy and "accounting" to track who has delegated what to whom, and to inform people who their votes got used.

But it's technologically feasible. And with BlockChains it's even plausible we can build a distributed one without central authority.

Links

Bookmarked 2021-04-11T22:19:01.207142: https://blog.democracy.space/2016/09/21/what-is-liquid-democracy/

Bookmarked 2021-04-11T22:18:54.811676: https://www.redbridge.gov.uk/media/4987/liquid-democracy.pdf

Bookmarked 2021-04-11T22:18:51.145485: https://markvanrijmenam.medium.com/liquid-democracy-how-blockchain-can-improve-the-democratic-process-and-enable-a-liquid-democracy-9914cb86568e

Bookmarked 2021-04-11T22:18:42.086994: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.08774.pdf