scholarly journals Liquid Democracy: An Algorithmic Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 1223-1252
Author(s):  
Anson Kahng ◽  
Simon Mackenzie ◽  
Ariel Procaccia
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Correct Decision ◽  
Majority Opinion ◽  
Local Neighborhood ◽  
Liquid Democracy ◽  
Non Local ◽  
Two Alternatives

We study liquid democracy, a collective decision making paradigm that allows voters to transitively delegate their votes, through an algorithmic lens. In our model, there are two alternatives, one correct and one incorrect, and we are interested in the probability that the majority opinion is correct. Our main question is whether there exist delegation mechanisms that are guaranteed to outperform direct voting, in the sense of being always at least as likely, and sometimes more likely, to make a correct decision. Even though we assume that voters can only delegate their votes to better-informed voters, we show that local delegation mechanisms, which only take the local neighborhood of each voter as input (and, arguably, capture the spirit of liquid democracy), cannot provide the foregoing guarantee. By contrast, we design a non-local delegation mechanism that does provably outperform direct voting under mild assumptions about voters.

Aggregation of Information by Binary Voting Rules

2019 ◽  
pp. 126-144
Author(s):  
Shmuel Nitzan ◽  
Jacob Paroush
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Aggregation Rule ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Relevant Variables ◽  
Aggregation Of Information ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

A group of individuals faces the choice of an alternative out of a set of alternatives. Each member of the group holds an opinion regarding the most suitable (best) alternative for which he or she votes. In this setting, the individual votes are based on their decisional competencies, which hinge on the information to which they are exposed and on their ability to make use of that information. The main question is how to translate the group members’ voting profile to a single collective choice. This chapter studies different aspects of this question in the context of binary voting where the group faces only two alternatives. The selection of an appropriate aggregation rule is a central issue in the fields of social choice, public choice, voting theory, and collective decision making. Since the votes are based on the individual competencies, the applied aggregation rule should take into account not only the voting profile but also the competency profile. In fact, it should also take into consideration any other relevant environmental information such as the asymmetry between the feasible alternatives, the dependence between individual votes, decision-making costs, and the available past record of the voters’ decisions. The chapter focuses on the clarification of the relationship between the performance of binary aggregation rules and the relevant variables and parameters. This has direct normative implications regarding the desirable mode of collective decision making and, in particular, regarding the desirable aggregation rule and the size and the composition of the decision-making body.

scholarly journals A Contribution to the Critique of Liquid Democracy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ioannis Caragiannis ◽  
Evi Micha
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Recent Model ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Negative Results ◽  
Liquid Democracy

Liquid democracy, which combines features of direct and representative democracy has been proposed as a modern practice for collective decision making. Its advocates support that by allowing voters to delegate their vote to more informed voters can result in better decisions. In an attempt to evaluate the validity of such claims, we study liquid democracy as a means to discover an underlying ground truth. We revisit a recent model by Kahng et al. [2018] and conclude with three negative results, criticizing an important assumption of their modeling, as well as liquid democracy more generally. In particular, we first identify cases where natural local mechanisms are much worse than either direct voting or the other extreme of full delegation to a common dictator. We then show that delegating to less informed voters may considerably increase the chance of discovering the ground truth. Finally, we show that deciding delegations that maximize the probability to find the ground truth is a computationally hard problem.

scholarly journals Iterative Delegations in Liquid Democracy with Restricted Preferences

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (02) ◽  
pp. 1926-1933
Author(s):  
Bruno Escoffier ◽  
Hugo Gilbert ◽  
Adèle Pass-Lanneau
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Stable State ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Liquid Democracy ◽  
The Stability

Liquid democracy is a collective decision making paradigm which lies between direct and representative democracy. One main feature of liquid democracy is that voters can delegate their votes in a transitive manner so that: A delegates to B and B delegates to C leads to A delegates to C. Unfortunately, because voters' preferences over delegates may be conflicting, this process may not converge. There may not even exist a stable state (also called equilibrium). In this paper, we investigate the stability of the delegation process in liquid democracy when voters have restricted types of preference on the agent representing them (e.g., single-peaked preferences). We show that various natural structures of preference guarantee the existence of an equilibrium and we obtain both tractability and hardness results for the problem of computing several equilibria with some desirable properties.

Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "

Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Collective Judgment ◽  
Hidden Knowledge

The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of individual judgment, placing it instead into the realm of collective judgment. The Athenian experience therefore suggests that participatory democracy, and a civic culture that fosters political equality rather than reliance on individual expertise, provides a key bulwark against corruption.

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