When is liquid democracy possible?
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?
Authors
- Michelle Yeo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-3676-4809)
- Jakub Svoboda (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1419-3267)
- Seth Gilbert (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3298-7412)
- Krishnendu Chatterjee (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4561-241X)
- Stefan Schmid (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7798-1711)
Institutions
- Institute of Science and Technology Austria (AT)
- National University of Singapore (SG)
- Weizenbaum Institute (DE)
- Technische Universität Berlin (DE)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2025-06-13
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3732772.3733544
- Primary Topic
- Electoral Systems and Political Participation
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Ministry of Education - Singapore
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- Austrian Science Fund
- Ministry of Education, India
- European Research Council