The Potential of Quadratic Voting for Cohousing Communities

Quadratic voting (QV) is a means of making collective decisions that include and reflect the intensity of individual voter preferences. While QV has mainly been applied to legislative case studies, it is our conjecture that QV also holds potential for decision-making processes taking place in cohousing communities. To explore this conjecture, we conducted a situated design case study in which we introduced QV into the decision-making process of the Community Land Trust H-buurt, Amsterdam (NL). Our case study includes four situated actions taken from an embedded position in the community, and yielded data ranging from screenshots, sketch notes and photos, to a QV tool, ballot issues and voting data. In this paper, we describe our case study in more detail, report and discuss our results, and present our conclusion that cohousing is ripe for QV as well as recommendations to operationalize QV in this domain.