Information Aggregation in Liquid Democracy
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Liquid democracy is a system that combines aspects of direct democracy and representative democracy by allowing voters to either vote directly themselves, or delegate their votes to others. In this paper we study the information aggregation properties of liquid democracy in a setting with heterogeneously informed truth-seeking voters—who want the election outcome to match an underlying state of the world—and partisan voters. We establish that liquid democracy admits equilibria which improve welfare and information aggregation over direct and representative democracy when voters’ preferences and information precisions are publicly or privately known. When precisions are commonly known, we provide sufficient conditions for this improvement being strict and characterize optimal delegation for important classes of committees. Liquid democracy also admits equilibria which do worse than the other two systems. We discuss features of efficient and inefficient equilibria and provide conditions under which voters can more easily coordinate on the efficient equilibria in liquid democracy than the other two systems.
Source: Stanford Digital Repository
DOI: 10.25740/td603kh0184
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6945970115
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