Direct voting and proxy voting

Green-Armytage, James

doi:10.1007/s10602-014-9176-9

Cited by 60 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…There are only a few papers that provide theoretical analyses of liquid democracy [12,9,14]. We would like to stress the differences between our approach and the one adopted by Kahng et al [14].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Fluid Mechanics of Liquid Democracy

Gölz

Kahng

Mackenzie

et al. 2018

Web and Internet Economics

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Liquid democracy is the principle of making collective decisions by letting agents transitively delegate their votes. Despite its significant appeal, it has become apparent that a weakness of liquid democracy is that a small subset of agents may gain massive influence. To address this, we propose to change the current practice by allowing agents to specify multiple delegation options instead of just one. Much like in nature, where -fluid mechanics teaches us -liquid maintains an equal level in connected vessels, so do we seek to control the flow of votes in a way that balances influence as much as possible. Specifically, we analyze the problem of choosing delegations to approximately minimize the maximum number of votes entrusted to any agent, by drawing connections to the literature on confluent flow. We also introduce a random graph model for liquid democracy, and use it to demonstrate the benefits of our approach both theoretically and empirically.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Fluid Mechanics of Liquid Democracy

Gölz

Kahng

Mackenzie

et al. 2018

Web and Internet Economics

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“…Examples include the German Piratenpartei 1 and the EU Horizon 2020 project WeGovNow (Boella et al, 2018), which have incorporated the LiquidFeedback 2 platform in their decision making, as well as grass-roots organizations such as the Democracy Earth Foundation 3 . Liquid democracy is a form of proxy voting (Miller, 1969;Tullock, 1992;Alger, 2006;Green-Armytage, 2015;Cohensius et al, 2017) where, in contrast to classical proxy voting, proxies are delegable (or transitive, or transferable). Suppose we are voting on a binary issue, then each voter can either cast her vote directly, or she can delegate her vote to a proxy, who can again either vote directly or, in turn, delegate to yet another proxy, and so forth.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Rational Delegations in Liquid Democracy

Bloembergen

Grossi

Lackner

2019

AAAI

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Liquid democracy is a proxy voting method where proxies are delegable. We propose and study a game-theoretic model of liquid democracy to address the following question: when is it rational for a voter to delegate her vote? We study the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibria in this model, and how group accuracy is affected by them. We complement these theoretical results by means of agent-based simulations to study the effects of delegations on group's accuracy on variously structured social networks. * This paper (without Appendix) appears in the proceedings of AAAI'19. We are indebted to the anonymous reviewers of IJCAI/ECAI'18 and AAAI'19 for many helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We are also grateful to the participants of the LAMSADE seminar at Paris Dauphine University, and the THEMA seminar at University Cergy-Pontoise where this work was presented, for many helpful comments and suggestions. Daan Bloembergen has received funding in the framework of the joint programming initiative ERA-

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“…One main advantage of this framework is its flexibility, as it enables voters to vote directly for issues on which they feel both concerned and expert and to delegate for others. In this way, LD provides a middle-ground between direct democracy, which is strongly democratic but which is likely to yield high abstention rates or uninformed votes, and representative democracy which is more practical but less democratic [GA15,Wie13]. Importantly, LD can be conveniently used in a Social Network (SN), where natural delegates are connected individuals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Convergence of Iterative Delegations in Liquid Democracy in a Social Network

Escoffier

Gilbert²,

Pass-Lanneau³

2019

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Liquid democracy is a collective decision making paradigm which lies between direct and representative democracy. One of its main features is that voters can delegate their votes in a transitive manner such that: A delegates to B and B delegates to C leads to A indirectly delegates to C. These delegations can be effectively empowered by implementing liquid democracy in a social network, so that voters can delegate their votes to any of their neighbors in the network. However, it is uncertain that such a delegation process will lead to a stable state where all voters are satisfied with the people representing them. We study the stability (w.r.t. voters preferences) of the delegation process in liquid democracy and model it as a game in which the players are the voters and the strategies are their possible delegations. We answer several questions on the equilibria of this process in any social network or in social networks that correspond to restricted types of graphs.We show that a Nash-equilibrium may not exist, and that it is even NP-complete to decide whether one exists or not. This holds even if the social network is a complete graph or a bounded degree graph. We further show that this existence problem is W[1]-hard w.r.t. the treewidth of the social network. Besides these hardness results, we demonstrate that an equilibrium always exists whatever the preferences of the voters iff the social network is a tree. We design a dynamic programming procedure to determine some desirable equilibria (e.g., minimizing the dissatisfaction of the voters) in polynomial time for tree social networks. Lastly, we study the convergence of delegation dynamics. Unfortunately, when an equilibrium exists, we show that a best response dynamics may not converge, even if the social network is a path or a complete graph.Aim of this paper. In this work, we tackle the problem of the stability of the delegation process in the LD setting. Indeed, it is likely that the preferences of voters over possible gurus will be motivated by different criteria and possibly contrary opinions. Hence, the iterative process where each voter chooses her delegate may end up in an unstable situation, i.e., a situation in which some voters would change their delegations. A striking example to illustrate this point is to consider an election where the voters could be positioned on the real line in a way that represents their right-wing left-wing political identity. If voters are ideologically close enough, each voter, starting from the left-side, could agree to delegate to her closest neighbor on her right. By transitivity, this would lead to all voters, including the extreme-left voters, having an extreme-right voter for guru. These unstable situations raise the questions: "Under what conditions do the iterative delegations of the voters always reach an equilibrium? Does such an equilibrium even exist? Can we determine equilibria that are more desirable than others?".We assume that voters are part of an SN represented by an undirected graph so that they can o...

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Direct voting and proxy voting

Cited by 60 publications

References 29 publications

The Fluid Mechanics of Liquid Democracy

The Fluid Mechanics of Liquid Democracy

On Rational Delegations in Liquid Democracy

The Convergence of Iterative Delegations in Liquid Democracy in a Social Network

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