User:Michael.gary16/Liquid democracy

Michael Gary

Professor Landemore

Open Democracy

5 May 2021

Liquid Democracy Wikipedia

Definition:

Liquid democracy is a form of delegative democracy whereby an electorate engages in collective decision-making through direct participation and dynamic representation. This democratic system utilizes elements of both direct and representative democracy. Voters in a liquid democracy have the right to vote directly on all policy issues à la direct democracy, however, voters also have the option to delegate their votes to someone who will vote on their behalf à la representative democracy. Any individual may be delegated votes (those delegated votes are termed "proxies") and these proxies may in turn delegate their vote as well as any votes they have been delegated by others resulting in "metadelegation".

This delegation of votes may be absolute (an individual divests their vote to someone else across all issues), policy-specific (an individual divests their vote to someone only when the vote concerns a certain issue), time-sensitive (an individual decides to divest their vote for a period of time), or not utilized by voters. In the case of absolute delegation, the voter situates themselves as a participant in a representative democracy, however, they have the right to revoke their vote delegation at any time. The appeal of the retractability mechanism stems from an increased accountability imposed on representatives. In policy specific delegation, voters may also select different delegates for different issues. Voters may select representatives they feel are more equipped to adjudicate in unfamiliar fields due to elevated expertise, personal experience, or another indicator of competence. Moreover, automatic recall allows citizens to be as engaged in political affairs as the rest of their lives permit. A voter may delegate their vote completely one week but decide to participate fully another. For those who wish to exercise their right to vote on all political matters, liquid democracy provides the flexibility to retain the option of direct democracy.

Origins:

In 1884, Charles Dodgson (more commonly referred to by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll), the author of the novel Alice in Wonderland, first envisioned the notion of transitive or "liquid" voting in his pamphlet The Principles of Parliamentary Representation.[1] Dodgson expounded a system predicated on multi-member districts where each voter casts a single vote or possesses the ability to transfer votes akin to the modern concept of liquid democracy.

In the 21st century, technological innovation has made liquid democracy more feasible to implement. The first online liquid democracy applications originated in Berlin, Germany following political disillusionment and the emergence of hacker culture.[1] Since liquid democracy gained traction in Germany, variations of liquid democratic forms have developed globally in political and economic spheres (examples listed at the bottom of the article).

Contrasted with Proxy Voting:

Liquid democracy utilizes the foundation of proxy voting but differs from this earlier model in the degree of scale. Unlike proxy voting, liquid democratic votes may be delegated to a proxy and the proxy may delegate their votes (individual and proxies) to an additional proxy. This process is termed "metadelegation". Though an individual's vote may be delegated numerous times, they retain the right to automatic recall. If someone who delegated their vote disagrees with the choices of their representative or proxy, they may either vote themselves or select another delegate for the next vote.

Contrasted with Direct Democracy:

Direct democracy is a form of democracy where all collective decisions are made by the direct voting contributions of individual citizens[1]. Though often perceived to be truly direct (e.g. only self-representation), direct democracies of the past, most notably in Athens, have utilized some form of representation[2]. Thus, the distinction between direct democracy lies not in liquid democracy's representative nature, but rather in the transitory method of delegation[3]... By contrast, in direct democracy, all eligible voters are expected to stay knowledgeable on all events and political issues, since voters make every decision on these political issues. Liquid democracy is said then to provide a more modern and flexible alternative to the revered direct democratic systems of ancient Greece.

Criticism:

Liquid democracy may evolve into a type of meritocracy with decisions being delegated to those with knowledge on a specific subject or with required experience. Whether or not this meritocratic delegation is normatively appealing, a study by researchers Ioannis Caragiannis and Evi Micha found the idea of less informed citizens delegating their votes to more informed citizens to be positively undesirable[23]. In issues where there exists a "ground truth" or "correct answer", Caragiannis and Micha concluded a subset of supposedly more informed voters within a larger populace would be less adept at identifying the ground truth than if every voter had voted directly or if all votes had been delegated to one supreme dictator[23].

Furthermore, liquid democracy as a democratic form is susceptible to oligarchic tendencies. Similar to electoral political systems, the concept of "distinction" is of central importance. Rather than empowering the general public, liquid democracy could concentrate power into the hands of a socially prominent, politically strategic, and wealthy few. Thus, liquid democracy is said to have the potential to create two classes divided by voting power inequity[24]. Helene Landemore, a political science professor at Yale University, describes this phenomenon as "star-voting" and argues individuals should have the right of permanent recall whereby voters who have delegated their vote to another individual may, at any time, retract their delegation and vote autonomously. However, the ability to automatically recall one's vote regarding any policy decision leads to an issue of policy inconsistency as different policies are voted on by different subsets of society[24].

Finally, liquid democracy faces the issue of scale. In large nation states with millions of voting citizens, it is likely the body of "liquid representatives" (those who have been delegated other citizen votes) will be significant. Consequently, deliberation and representation become pertinent concerns. To achieve meaningful deliberation, the liquid representatives would have to be split into numerous groups to attain a somewhat manageable discussion group size. As for representation, liquid democracy suffers from a similar issue facing electoral representative democracies where a single individual embodies the will of millions. Liquid democracy has been argued as a remedy for many issues plaguing democratic systems world-wide, however, critics question the normative attractiveness of a delegative, proxy democracy.

Examples:

Google experimented with liquid democracy through an internal social network system known as Google Votes. This liquid democratic experiment constitutes one of the less common corporate examples. Users of the existing Google+ platform were the voters and built-in discussion functions provided the deliberative element.[1] In this instance, Google Votes was used to select meal offerings.[1] Nonetheless, researchers came away with a number of recommendations regarding future implementations of liquid democracy on online platforms including delegation recommendations based on prior choices, issue recommendations based on prior participation, and delegation notifications to inform voters about their relative power.[1]

The relative liquidity of votes was lessened by a dampening algorithm intended to ensure representation stability.[1] Despite extensive planning, the real-world experiment was not conducted due to a lack favorability.[1]

Works Cited

Blum, Christian; Zuber, Christina Isabel (2016). "Liquid Democracy: Potentials, Problems, and

Perspectives". Journal of Political Philosophy. 24 (2): 162–182. doi:10.1111/jopp.12065. ISSN 1467-9760

Caragiannis, Ioannis; Micha, Evi (2019). "A Contribution to the Critique of Liquid Democracy":

116–122. doi:10.24963/ijcai.2019/17.

Dodgson, Charles (2012). The Principles of Parliamentary Representation. Nabu Press. ISBN

978-1277395686.

R. Hainisch and A. Paulin, "Civicracy: Establishing a Competent and Responsible Council of

Representatives Based on Liquid Democracy," 2016 Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government (CeDEM), 2016, pp. 10-16, doi: 10.1109/CeDEM.2016.27.

Landemore, Hélène (2020). Open democracy : reinventing popular rule for the twenty-first century.

Princeton, New Jersey. ISBN 0-691-20872-7. OCLC 1158505904.

Manin, Bernard, ed. (1997), "Direct democracy and representation: selection of officials in Athens",

The Principles of Representative Government, Themes in the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 8–41, doi:10.1017/cbo9780511659935.002, ISBN 978-0-521-45891-7, retrieved 28 April 2021

Ramos, José (2015), Winter, Jenifer; Ono, Ryota (eds.), "Liquid Democracy and the Futures of

Governance", The Future Internet, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 17, pp. 173–191, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-22994-2_11, ISBN 978-3-319-22993-5, retrieved 4 May 2021

Schiller, Theo. "Direct democracy". Encyclopedia Britannica, 22 Oct. 2020,

https://www.britannica.com/topic/direct-democracy. Accessed 27 April 2021.

Steve, Hardt; R., Lopes, Lia C. (2015). "Google Votes: A Liquid Democracy Experiment on a

Corporate Social Network". Technical Disclosure Commons.

Valsangiacomo, Chiara (2021). "Political Representation in Liquid Democracy". Frontiers in Political

Science. 3. doi:10.3389/fpos.2021.591853. ISSN 2673-3145.