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.

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.

scholarly journals VOX POPULI, VOX DEORUM? ATHENIAN DOCUMENT RELIEFS AND THE THEOLOGIES OF PUBLIC INSCRIPTION

2018 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 365-398
Author(s):  
William Mack
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
The Other ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Symbolic Representations ◽  
Divine Agency ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Decision Making

This article argues that, by concentrating on a reading of the depictions of deities on the Athenian document reliefs as symbolic representations of states rather than as divinities, previous scholarly approaches to them have failed to explore the role they ascribe to the gods in collective decision-making and the exercise of public authority. This article resituates the interpretation of these monuments in the context of other monuments depicting the gods and recent approaches to them, and the other ways in which public inscriptions, both at Athens and elsewhere, make reference to divine actors, through their erection in sacred spaces and the use of thetheoiheading. It then examines the range of possible readings of the relationship between divine agency and political decision-making which these monuments privilege and argues that they reflect a conventional understanding that, in general, Athenian decision-making was underpinned by the gods.

Nonmanipulable Collective Decision-Making for Games

2012 ◽  
pp. 67-81
Author(s):  
Rob LeGrand ◽  
Timothy Roden ◽  
Ron K. Cytron
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
The Other ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Game Development ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Collective Decisions ◽  
Higher Dimensional ◽  
Game Players

This chapter explores a new approach that may be used in game development to help human players and/or non-player characters make collective decisions. The chapter describes how previous work can be applied to allow game players to form a consensus from a simple range of possible outcomes in such a way that no player can manipulate it at the expense of the other players. Then, the text extends that result and shows how nonmanipulable consensus can be found in higher-dimensional outcome spaces. The results may be useful when developing artificial intelligence for non-player characters or constructing frameworks to aid cooperation among human players.

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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