Work

When is liquid democracy possible?

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Liquid democracy is a transitive vote delegation mechanism over voting graphs. It enables each voter to delegate their vote(s) to another better-informed voter, with the goal of collectively making a better decision. The question of whether liquid democracy outperforms direct voting has been previously studied in the context of local delegation mechanisms (where voters can only delegate to someone in their neighbourhood) and binary decision problems. It has previously been shown that it is impossible for local delegation mechanisms to outperform direct voting in general graphs. This raises the question: for which classes of graphs do local delegation mechanisms yield good results?

Source: ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC)

DOI: 10.1145/3732772.3733544

Authors: Krishnendu Chatterjee, Seth Gilbert, Stefan Schmid, Jakub Svoboda, Michelle Yeo

Institutions: Institute of Science and Technology Austria, National University of Singapore, Weizenbaum Institute, Technische Universität Berlin

Language: English

Topic: Game Theory and Voting Systems

Subfield: Economics and Econometrics

Field: Economics, Econometrics and Finance

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: hybrid