Liquid Democracy was tried in practice in the Pirate Party of Germany.
Some people amassed a small bunch of delegations while the system was new and interesting, then usage dropped off. Since the delegations didn't expire, individual votes didn't matter - these "super delegates" had so much voting power that they'd generally outvote the remaining active users of the system. Combine this with the high cost of participating yourself (you need to repeatedly inform yourself and engage with the system) compared to delegation (just pick a person that seems reasonable once and forget it).
The lack of having any meaningful voice further discouraged people from participating, both in the system and the party as a whole. It sounds good in theory, but I'm not sure this practical hurdle can be overcome. There will usually be a majority of mostly passive users, and the corrective power of Liquid Democracy ignores this and assumes users change their vote if their delegate votes against their interest.
The Swiss system (a sufficiently large group of people can initiate a referendum or popular initiative, then the matter is put to a one-person-one-vote vote) seems like a very practical solution to the problem where you want the "boring" decisions handled by someone else, while keeping them in check and allowing controversial decisions to be overturned.
The German pirate party was pure chaos, was created rapidly and fell of quickly even outside of the liquid democracy system. and I don't think its fair to blame all of this on the platform.
> The lack of having any meaningful voice further discouraged people from participating, both in the system and the party as a whole.
Yeah but people participate in regular democracy all the time where you have even less voice.
So people participate if they think its important enough.
In the German system you just had a lot of very passive members that initially selected from a really small group and the system never got beyond that.
The party as a whole collapsed because it had a hugely broad range of people in it that were unified only on one topic, discussion on anything else basically went know-where.
> There will usually be a majority of mostly passive users, and the corrective power of Liquid Democracy ignores this and assumes users change their vote if their delegate votes against their interest.
The actual implementation can also do a lot of change this depending on how it is implemented. How much power do you delegate. Do you delegate all power or only for a certain topics and so on.
> The Swiss system (a sufficiently large group of people can initiate a referendum or popular initiative, then the matter is put to a one-person-one-vote vote) seems like a very practical solution to the problem where you want the "boring" decisions handled by someone else, while keeping them in check and allowing controversial decisions to be overturned.
Being from Switzerland, that system has a lot to recommend it, but also has problems. There is certainty much further to go.
It seems to me you are coming down to hard on the whole concept. Some kind of system where I can somehow give away power to somebody that represents me is always required. How to do that in a good way is the question.
1) That sounds like a "nudge" i.e. you're already manipulating the system to encourage your preferred outcome.*
2) Also, how are you going to get something like that passed without the agreement of the delegates?
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[*] It's like when states send out arbitrary letters to welfare recipients that have to be signed and sent back within X days just to knock people off the rolls who aren't paying attention to the mail or are afraid of or don't understand the form.
> you're already manipulating the system to encourage your preferred outcome.
That is a very one sided look at it. Any system encourages something.
If you make improvements simply to make the overall system operate better then its not manipulation towards a better outcome.
> Also, how are you going to get something like that passed without the agreement of the delegates?
That is literally the problem any system of democracy has. Every system of democracy has some established initial rules and must evolve from there. Those that have good initial rules tend to evolve better but many things have an effect.
And you do it the same way in liquid system as in any other system, politics. You try to find a group that supports it for some reason, even for not the same reason. You get together those that have not delegated, you mobilize those that have delegated and try to inform them that their delegate is changing their interest and you find some that already have 'super' status that they could actually gain votes in that are now tied up 'bad' delegates.
Of course all evolution of rules in democracy is always a huge bitch but that doesn't make liquid democracy systems different form other systems.
And just like with every other system of democracy it makes sense to establish best practices and it makes sense to learn and improve the system over time. When somebody knew wants to use it they have a better starting point.
So the second point is kind of pointless, just because some improvement maybe wouldn't be adopted in an already existing system doesn't mean its not a worthy improvement. Just as we know Range voting would be have huge improvement over existing voting systems. Nobody sane today would design a first past the post voting system with single delegate districts.
> "2) Also, how are you going to get something like that passed without the agreement of the delegates?"
Why would the vast majority of minority delegates be incentivized to let the few delegates with plurality (but not majority) power automatically keep their delegations?
I believe that was eventually introduced, but too little too late. It doesn't fix the asymmetry which makes direct participation a rather theoretical possibility.
Wouldn't the Swiss system also encourage controversial decisions to be rapidly validated by a majority? Part of the supposed appeal of representative government is to prevent the rabble for voting for free bread and no taxes, right?
You'd think, but time and time again, the "rabble" votes against it's own interest. We had an initiative for 6 weeks holidays - shot down. We had other good (IMO) initiatives on UBI, Healthcare, you name it - shot down. The system is quite stable and is also not immune to lobbying and fearmongering. It seems both qualities can be true at the same time.
Maybe you just have difference on opinion what their own interest is. Its pretty rich to presume that you know what in the best interest of everybody is.
Just saying its all because of fearmongering and to stupidity of the plebs is an elitists attitude that I dislike.
Of course lobbying has an effect. That literally what democracy is built on. Lobbying is effective also in things that you like, not just those that you dislike.
We also had a lot of initiatives that were accompanied by lots of fearmongering (vote for this or country if fucked) that were rejected.
A common objection against the use of these platforms is the delegation system, where a user can delegate his vote to another user, giving rise to so-called super-voters, i.e. powerful users who receive many delegations. It has been asserted in the past that the presence of these super-voters undermines the democratic process, and therefore delegative democracy should be avoided. In this paper, we look at the emergence of super-voters in the largest delegative online democracy platform worldwide, operated by Germany's Pirate Party. We investigate the distribution of power within the party systematically, study whether super-voters exist, and explore the influence they have on the outcome of votings conducted online. While we find that the theoretical power of super-voters is indeed high, we also observe that they use their power wisely.
The Related Work section may also be of interest for you.
Are you aware of any research specifically into the risk of demotivating people who expect the ability to participate directly, but are then facing a situation where e.g. a single superdelegate can nix an initiative (this is a possibility I saw mentioned in the Jabbusch analysis)?
I'd be interested to know how much of that is just my own perception vs. what the actual data says.
In the sense of explicit research into this? Not much, especially I'm not aware of anything regarding the demotivational effect of having individual votes stand directly against superdelegate votes.
If you are just looking for information on the system in general, look for "Liquid Democracy", "Piratenpartei", "Liquid Feedback" (the name of the system used), and "LQFB" (acronym for the previous). Most of the info will be in German though.
https://www.sebastianjabbusch.de/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/... is probably the most thorough analysis you'll find, but the survey results have (according to the study itself) strong biases towards active members, the two surveys used different wording for questions so you can't make out trends, and it often commingles Liquid Democracy, the tool used, and direct participation in the party overall, which can make it hard to attribute answers to Liquid Democracy (IIRC it wasn't ever used in a binding manner).
Regarding the biases, 65% of survey participants claim they don't use delegations (page 156 by the numbering of the PDF), page 110 and following shows how high the percentage of delegated vs. direct votes was.
There is a clear, immediate problem: are experts correctly identified? But there is also a second, more subtle, but also more fundamental question: even if the experts are correctly identified, delegation deprives the electorate of the richness of noisy but abundant information distributed among all voters. Unless the extent of delegation is modulated correctly, Condorcet has taught us that a smaller number of independent voters, even if more accurate, may well lead to worse decision-making. This very basic trade-off is the necessary point of departure of Liquid Democracy and is the focus of this paper.
Seems highly tendentious to me. How is abundance synonymous with richness when processing costs are ignored? The whole point of delegation is that it's not efficient or enjoyable for everyone to get up to speed on everything. Representative democracy is ass because representatives' own intellectual capacity is limited and the incentives for self-dealing vastly outweigh those for probity. Liquid democracy proposes to delegate on a per-issue basis, but the cost of expert identification is necessarily a function of the cost of expertise acquisition. Further, the payoffs for right or wrong decisions isn't always apparent in size or time. These latter considerations don't seem to have been factored in, causing the paper to read as a dismissal of a proposed heuristic by comparison to an impractical ideal.
I'm not really sure that "expert" is objectively quantifiable. Plenty of experts have their own biases, especially when it comes to information that conflicts with positions they have long advocated for.
I'm thinking specifically here of the various stories that crop up when a grad student can't publish work that contradicts their advisor's own published work, but there are also plenty of examples in other fields as well.
At the end of the day, you have people who have either studied a thing or have direct experience working with it, and you assign them some amount of trust since they've done it more than you have. You don't need to know much about a particular sub field of biology to recognize that someone claims to have expertise in biology.
Knowing some yourself helps you see if they're making it up. Even if you don't know much, you can still pick up on whether they are open to new ideas, though.
All of this is to say that reducing "expertise" to a quantifiable binary answer is not an easy thing.
And of course asking military experts about things like if wars can be won and how is often questionable as well. Experts are often experts because they are interested in those topics, and that itself is a bias. You probably don't turn into a general because you a pacifist.
So there is already a certain selection bias in who would even become an expert and why.
I mean the cost to the non-expert voter to identify which expert to trust on a given issue. For example, we are all pretty technical here, but who would you pick as the most expert for each of the top 10 programming languages? IDing all 10 would be quite a bit of work.
a side note to my sibling post about the bayesian truth serum, which can be used to surface "experts", is that BTS discovers experts by rarity of knowledge in the crowd and correctness of metaknowledge of the crowd. The existence of experts is a critical assumption. A corollary is that the maximal knowledge is bound by the crowd.
But also, since it's relative to the population, the knowledge of "experts" does not need to have any bearing on truth. I thought this would be a problem in our context, but then I thought, that's not so far from reality anyway!
this is indeed a costly problem, but I suspect there are economical solutions using technology.
Expert identification can, to a degree, be bootstrapped out of a crowd using something like Prelec's Bayesian Truth Serum (https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1102081). The tldr is that it fishes out holders of unusually surprising knowledge relative to the population. I was involved in a study that used BTS effectively to identify expert dermatologists.
I imagine it's possible to find a sweet spot between voluntary querying (a-la slashdot) by a rotating, small party combined with a variant of BTS which surfaces the experts as needed.
The cost of identification will still scale with the group, but it might be doable at ratios that are similar to moderator:users in forums.
Personally I think a representative system is more workable than a direct system for exactly the reason you've highlighted it's not feasible to expect every voter to be an expert on every issue, you need to be able to delegate the responsibility to someone better informed.
The idea in theory is that it is the full time job of the elected representative to stay informed on the issues and advance the interest of their constituents.
I think this probably worked better when electorates were more homogenous, going back historically to a time when towns (and the major districts of cities) were focused around one (or a limited few) key industries. During that time I imagine it was much easier for an elected representative to know what was in the interests of their constituents. Modern cities and towns tend to be quite diverse which makes it a lot harder for a single representative to adequately advocate for the majority of their electorate.
Maybe there needs to be some thought given to organizing electoral representation around something other than geographical area.
It is a difficult problem I'm not sure if too many other options have been attempted in the past.
I'm not an expert but I suspect the roots of current system with people in a common location electing a representative for their area evolved out of feudalism where you had a land holding lord in charge of all the serfs in an area. How did other historical democracies work? (I know Greek city states used direct democracy and I think Rome Senate had some kind of rotating system where people took turns). Outside of democracy I think some communists messed around with representation along class lines during the Russian revolution the soviet councils were organized with a representative from each of the soldiers, the peasants and the workers of the area. Some dictatorships have had 'grand councils' (and the like) but no idea how people were assigned to them, I suspect not in a representative manner...
Modenr Governments have many levels, and how your voting power plays out on various levels is hugely complicated and matters.
Geography is clearly still important. Voting with all other butchers of the nations about what kind of public transport system should exists is of course dumb.
But in some sense, by extension voting geographically for a person in your district to discuss if going to war with X nations or how abortion should be handled makes less sense. Also if you vote geographically for somebody that then decides over the whole nation can lead to the effect of the national will being manipulated to improve individual districts to gain voting power.
The president in the US is really the only person who represents the nation, everybody else is primarily interested in their district or state. In Switzerland we don't vote for any person on federal level, only specific issues.
And that is even before you get to the question of how power, taxation and so on should be distributed over all these levels. That a whole other can of worms.
IIRC in Rome people voting by social class (plebe, patrician, equestrian, something like that).
> "Maybe there needs to be some thought given to organizing electoral representation around something other than geographical area."
Various thought has been. I think "party lists" are one of them. Since computers have made calculations easier I'm in favor (for things like the House of Representatives) of electing multiple candidates per district, but weighting their power within the House by the number or proportion of votes they received. And maybe making a 5% cutoff to be elected to prevent too many representatives, or doing something with ranked choice voting.
I'm a fan of liquid democarcy on a conceptual level so this result is surprising to me. Started a side project to test it out in a game environment, basically an online Nomic[1] although I have abandoned it for now. Reading through some of the paper makes me realize I didn't think it through as deep as the authors and I'm probably not smart enough.
I understand they used a perceptual test to figure out who the experts are.
And 'over delegation' results in losing benefits of delegates who have information that might be useful?
This is not clear to me:
"...it (over delegation) reduces the variety of independent information sources"
In a perceptual task where one is found to be better than the other participants, why wouldn't it be the case that voting for the best participent (the expert) gives you the best result? I think I'm missing something
Assume we're deciding on a binary choice. Also assume that there is one correct and one wrong answer, and the only reason people choose wrong is a lack of information. Next assume each participant in the vote has a particular chance of getting the right answer.
Lets take an extreme case where you have a million people each with a 55% chance of getting the right answer, and one expert with an 80% chance of getting the right answer.
If you have a normal vote, the right answer is EXTREMELY likely to win. But if everyone delegates to the expert (after all 80% is better than 55%) then the right answer only has an 80% chance of winning. Worse outcome.
So it's a variance thing? So by this logic, expanding the amount of experts who are delegates would probably fix the issue? Let's say you have a 100 experts in charge who have an average of 70% right answer, it would still be extremely likely the right answer gets chosen.
It seems more experts would be selected in a real world system as it doesn't have all the assumptions you mentioned.
- No binary choice (multiple solutions to one problem)
- Not always a right or wrong answer (a lot of issues are preferential)
That's kind of what the experiment was about. They wanted to know: If we run this simple game of chance and delegation with real people, do people delegate more or less than the optimal amount?
They found that people delegated more than would be optimal.
Now -- whether that says anything about liquid democracy applied to real world situations is quite a different question, of course. As you started to point out.
> The two designs are very different, but the experiments reach the same result: in both, delegation rates are unexpectedly high and higher than abstention rates, and LD underperforms relative to both universal voting and abstention.
What might be the meaning of "underperforms" in this context?
For example, consider one of the parametrizations we
study: a group of 15 voters of which 3 are experts; the experts’ information is correct with
probability 70%, while the precision of non-experts’ signals can take any value between 50
and 70%, with equal probability. Then only non-experts with signals of precision close to
random should delegate: a non-expert with information that she knows is only 55% likely to
be correct should not delegate to experts whom she knows to be correct with probability 70%.
""
This is not about politics, or subjective questions about complicated situations. It imagines a world in which there is one correct answer and the reason that different people vote differently is due to a lack of information about that truth.
This is very much a simplified "game" they're playing with. In this context, the result -- I think -- is more like an outcome of the central limit theorem. Basically, if you get lots of people each with a 55% chance of being correct to vote on a binary choice, they're very likely to pick the correct choice in aggregate. If you have one person who is 70% correct vote, they're 30% likely to get it wrong. So you actually don't want too many of the 55% people to delegate their decision to the 70% person, which is a bit counter-intuitive.
This is sort of interesting, and I think says something useful about the Liquid Democracy concept. However I think the experiment is simplified to the point that it's a categorically different thing than even moderately interesting political questions, and so I don't think it's an argument against applying liquid democracy to politics.
In the experiments, there are two options, exactly one of which is designated correct, and voters are given the task of voting for the correct option using imperfect information as to which one that is.
"Underperforms" then means that the correct option is chosen less often. (If you want a more precise mathematical statement, the explanation of the model starts on page 8.)
Basically, the model subscribes to the "mistake theory" of political disagreement ( https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/74vpwm/soci... ) that there is a single outcome that's best for everyone and disagreements only happen because sometimes people are mistaken as to which outcome that is.
In a "conflict-theoretical" experiment where voters are trying to maximize their benefit even at the expense of others, I suspect people would do quite well at identifying a member of their own tribe to delegate their vote to.
> Basically, the model subscribes to the "mistake theory" of political disagreement ( https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/74vpwm/soci... ) that there is a single outcome that's best for everyone and disagreements only happen because sometimes people are mistaken as to which outcome that is.
Ok thanks for this....it doesn't make it make sense, but it's useful to know where people's errors lie.
Was confused by that as well. Sounds like Liquid Democracy doesn't do well compared to the alternatives, which would certainly be an interesting result, but doesn't fit with what the rest of the abstract seems to be suggesting.
Agreed, I think the authors of this study oversold the conclusions. They have a valid point insofar as delegation is not a magic bullet, and people often over-delegate.
Perhaps that latter is because they are OK with representative democracy in principle, but want the capacity to revoke & reallocate their vote without waiting months or years for an election.
I found the study disappointingly shallow and conclusory by comparison to the usually excellent standards of the NBER, but it might be that the cost of surveying people limited the depth of their investigation.
Liquid democracy, direct democracies and all these shenanigans sound good on paper but they are incredibly easy to manipulate by the government.
Only paper ballots, with humans counting them, and humans observing them, can properly be "Proof of human": proof that there's an actual human being behind the vote. The fundamental problem in "Proof of human" is that fake identities are easily fabricated, dead humans can keep on voting if the government "forgets" about them, and finally, backdoors can be inserted into software systems creating a single point of failure, and the incentives of the government funding these systems is to get re-elected. Mail ballots, voting machines, and early voting where there are months of voting and volunteers don't have time to oversee months of voting, it's all problematic.
The fundamental measure in "Proof of human" is how many humans you need to trust to have confidence in the results. Do you need million election workers to go rogue? 100,000? 100? or maybe only 20 election workers in the right position can completely change the result? That's what makes the difference between fraud being a conspiracy and plausible: the number of people who need to be part of the conspiracy.
Getting a cryptographic backdoor in electronic voting systems is not even in conspiracy land, it requires only handful of people to be a part of it, and it can even happen remotely by an adversary country (such as Russia).
> "Only paper ballots, with humans counting them, and humans observing them, can properly be "Proof of human""
In Glarus and Appenzell Innerrhoden the discussion, voting, and vote counting is live and in person. The votes are typically tallied by counting raised hands. Probably superior to counting paper ballots.
If there was a regular requirement to re-confirm delegations, maybe, but "chain delegations" are another problem. Voting power is transferable. If A and B delegate to C, and C delegates to D, D has a voting power of 4.
The goal of liquid democracy was specifically to not be a regular representative democracy, and to (meaningfully) allow direct participation, and it fails spectacularly at that.
The proof of human problems is actually addressable. We can imagine that the state publishes all public keys of its citizens in persistent storage, perhaps engraved in the stone, along with the name and where to find the person.
To verify that the state is keeping the record of citizens, accurate auditors come in. They can select 100 individuals verifiably random (for instance, taking hash function and sorting) and try to reach out to these individuals and check that they indeed own the keys they have been assigned, for instance, signing an auditor-given message. The number of individuals who did not have the correct keys or were unreachable could then be used to infer the legitimacy of elections being run.
You still didn't prove the non existence of cryptographic backdoor, hardware backdoor or anything else in the chain.
There's also a decent chance the audit fail, then now what do you do? A person can be unreachable. Do you now cancel the entire system because a person was unreachable? If the answer is no, the audit is useless. It was already proved many times that audits which don't have any penalty or contingency when they fail are meaningless.
Moreover, You can't trust anyone's random other than your own. In this case, the so called auditors are also a small point of failure, and if you allow any1 to audit, people will eventually find someone who's missing.
Audits are like stack cookies, they are terrible security practice. You need to have security boundaries and defend them to have a good security system. Attempting to check if the horses left the stable is not a reliable boundary, it's good only as supplemental security measure. Just like having a blue team and a red team isn't enough, you need to have firewalls, you need to have defensible network architecture. You need endpoint protection, and you need to keep everything updated.
> A person can be unreachable. Do you now cancel the entire system because a person was unreachable?
You can always source the missing people on national TV ;)
The goal of the audit is to estimate the number of voters who could have been compromised and the effect it could have had on the election result. In case the percentage of unreachable voters has been larger than the difference between losing and winning parties, then elections could be cancelled elsewise the result stands.
> You need to have security boundaries and defend them to have a good security system.
I don't see much difference between corporate practices that aim to prevent unauthorised access to secrets and digital identity management at the state level. Am I missing something?
Yes, the threat model is that the government is the malicious entity and the people are the verifier.
If the government creates the code and the protocols they are hard to secure against the government itself.
Elections are the only time you do not trust your government because in elections you establish your trust. If you trust the government with elections that's a circular trust problem and it only needs to win once.
So the boundaries are what the people can verify, what many Bobs and Alices can do physically together in the real world to see that real Bob and Alice exists and support the government. And the government is Eve. If you're giving Eve the power to determine who's real without needing to present a real human, you already lost.
Audits means that Eve only needs to compromise a few more auditors. Real elections Eve needs to compromise impossible number of people.
> If the government creates the code and the protocols, they are hard to secure against the government itself.
> Elections are the only time you do not trust your government because in elections you establish your trust. If you trust the government with elections that's a circular trust problem and it only needs to win once.
I wholeheartedly agree. I think you may find a good read on electoral transparency which develops that further:
> Olivier Belanger, Randi Markussen, Lorena Ronquillo, Carsten Schurmann, Framing Electoral Transparency: A Comparative Analysis of Three E-vote Counting Ceremonies, 2016.
From the top thread, I thought you attacked the notion of a digital identity itself.
> The proof of human problems is actually addressable
I think it's fundamentally impossible and I have yet to see something that make me envision the possibility it could be possible.
The most important part of democratic vote is not the ballot box but the voting booth : the place where you have the guaranty that every citizen go only once per vote, is alone and can decide by himself without any external pressure what to put in the ballot box.
Every electronic or remote systems is subject in a way or an other to the risk of vote buying or threat to force people to vote against their will.
The top thread emphasises the problem of digital identity. It's the question of how we can be sure that the digital credentials with which voters participate have been allocated fairly, like having fake passports printed, impersonating dead people or voting in place of those who often don't come to vote.
> I have yet to see something that make me envision the possibility it could be possible.
Remote electronic voting is a very hard problem to crack. The systems that could have some merit have fallen out from academic endeavours. I recommend looking at this paper could help to envision the possibility:
> Rolf Haenni, Oliver Spycher, Secure Internet Voting on Limited Devices with Anonymized DSA Public Keys, 2011.
Hands raised is even better, fair point. So long as you're physically verifying humans, it's good. The problem is that usually direct and liquid democracy aren't scalable, and you're not going to do country wide elections on everything. So these methods tend to converge to some electronic hack instead.
In Switzerland we do direct democracy with paper and count the votes in a 1 day. This can be done many times a year.
> and you're not going to do country wide elections on everything.
Well sure. As in you can't make literally every single choice of a government by direct democracy. That literally impossible because those are millions and millions of choices every minute.
Nothing will solve that problem, in the end of the day you need some people to simply have people doing their job to make these choices based on what was decided on a higher level.
So the question is how do these people get in those jobs and then do they select the people that work below them or who does that.
In Switzerland we elect a parliament, that parliament elects top level ministers and their choices can be over-written or new laws can be interceded with direct democracy.
You can alternatively have a system where instead of the parliament electing top ministers, a liquid democracy system elects those ministers and makes the choices normally made by parliament. The ministers work for the liquid democracy and have to implement the choices made in that system. Or you could go beyond just the ministers and elect a broader set of people.
> So these methods tend to converge to some electronic hack instead.
No its not some 'electronic hack'. Its just a question about what things should we want to use these systems for and what not.
Nobody proposes to use liquid democracy to decide what kind of colors should be used when buying new pens or whatever.
Given the high rates of delegation, we could just make delegation the default. Then we could have people vote, not on issues directly, but to choose delegates who will "represent" them. We could even call them "representatives," and call the resulting system "representative democracy."
There, I fixed it! You don't need to have fixed geographical districts, of course; party-list proportional representation is pretty close to just deciding how you want to delegate your share of power.
At least one noteworthy difference is that in Liquid Democracy, individuals can choose who they delegate their vote to, as opposed to choosing between two people who have been chosen for them, who often differ little in behavior (despite telling very different stories).
I don’t think that our current problems come from the failings of our voting methods, but rather from a lack of political vision of what we want to achieve. Citing Adam Curtis’ “HyperNormalisation”, 2016, at 2:19:12:
> And the other revolutions were also failing.
> The Occupy camps had become trapped in endless meetings and it became clear that there was a terrible confusion at the heart of the movement.
> The radicals had believed that if they could create a new way of organizing people, then a new society would emerge.
> But what they did not have was a picture of what that society would be like, a vision of the future.
> The truth was that their revolution was not about an idea, it was about how you manage things.
> And those who had started the revolution in Egypt came face to face with the same terrible fact: social media had helped to bring people together in Tahir square, but once there the Internet gave no clue as to what kind of new society they could create in Egypt.
> The movement stalled, and a group that did have a powerful idea, the Muslim Brotherhood, rushed in to fill the vacuum.
Although I'm all for exploring different avenues of democratic decision making and liquid democracy is definitely something I'm interested in and so this article is really valuable information; for a while now I've been much more interested in forms of participation that require more from it's participants and not less.
I think for this reason I'm much more interested in the experiments done with citizens assemblies and minipublics. They seem to be much more better suited for combating misinformation as well as most of the perverse incentives of traditional politics, the latter being problems that wouldn't go away with delegation as I would imagine most people would end up delegating because it's so similar to our current form of participation which is representative voting.
To me, one of the biggest issues right now in politics is that politicians have pretty much stopped trying to build a country together as much just trying to keep things going in ways that don't affect them too much. As in, people from both parties have very similar interests: keep themselves in power. This doesn't seem to lead to good decisions being made, but when you have referendums that is top down direct democracy it seems to be, now a days, a process that can be very easily manipulated to spread misinformation. We can look at the Colombian referendum for peace, brexit and the recent Chilean referendum for a new constitution.
With this in mind, it seems to me like we need designs that are a bit more complex and I do think citizens assemblies fit the bill. I encourage anyone that's interested to take a look at Helene Landemore's Open Democracy.
The big problem with sortition (which Landemore appears to be arguing for) is that it's uh non-democratic. Instead of allowing citizens to vote for their representatives, you're literally removing the fundamental basis of democracy and doing something else entirely. I'm sure neither the author nor you see that as a stepping stone to authoritarianism, but it kind of is.
I'd be open to exploring citizens assemblies that are democratically elected & assembled for a set period of time to tackle one specific issue. But they have to be voted in, random sortition is unacceptable
That's not really something I agree with? I find sortition to be one of the most democratic form of participation.
Modern political systems in the west, that is to say, liberal democracy through representative voting is entirely oligarchical. Look at parliaments all over the world and how they correlate with the population as whole in terms of socioeconomic indicators, race, gender, etc. They are not representative at all of who makes up the population but instead they represent who the population believes and who the system allows to be capable of making decisions.
And this final part is what I really want to put emphasis on: who makes the actual decisions? I think here we might have different views but to me, who makes the decisions is the most important even more important than making the optimal decisions. I believe a system is more democratic if the decisions are being made by people who are actually, materially, involved in the consequences of said decisions.
And with that in mind, I think sortition is indeed much more democratic than voting because in sortition you get a group of people that are truly, socially, economically, gender-wise, race-wise, representative of the wider population. Not only that but in sortition everyone has the same chance of being able to access power, whereas in voting only those that are appealing to big demographics will be. I mean, it is not a coincidence that politicians tend to be extroverted and charismatic... but what about people who are shy and introverted? Is the only method of participation for them the vote?
So I guess in a few words: I believe sortition is more democratic because everyone gets the same chance to do active participation, rather than most people simply being able to vote for the few people who actually have the chance to debate, review and make decisions.
I really encourage you to read maybe Camila Vergara's book "Systemic Corruption" if you have a chance to get it which might change your perspective in terms of sortition and voting. Though in fairness, she suggests a system that's based on a network of local assemblies; but also argues in favor of sortition for certain position (as opposed to voting).
The problem with sortition is the problem of people using various means to opt out of jury duty. Jury duty, which typically lasts less than a week, still gets a variety of people opting out. Sortition for decision making would have far more people opting out, or would have to resort to draconian methods to prevent people opting out.
> "I believe a system is more democratic if the decisions are being made by people who are actually, materially, involved in the consequences of said decisions."
I believe a system is typically better if this is the case. Things can be done to bias elected decision makers toward behaving as if they are consequentially subject to the decisions. Term limits is one idea, increasing the number of members of the legislative bodies is another.
Why do you say sortition for decision making would have more people opting out? What's the basis for this?
But also, I think you might be underestimating the amount of people required to get actual representative samples of our populations. If you look at the experiments that have been done in France, Iceland, the EU even in countries in South America; minipublics haven't really had a big problem getting enough people to participate. You might be surprised just at how much people want to be able to have an input in how politics is done in our countries.
It's very different than jury duty in that when you're a juror you're going to be judging someone on their innocence, going through trials is tremendously emotionally taxing. I don't think that's something most people want to do; this is a different beast, I would say.
> I believe a system is typically better if this is the case. Things can be done to bias elected decision makers toward behaving as if they are consequentially subject to the decisions. Term limits is one idea, increasing the number of members of the legislative bodies is another.
We already have term limits, and most bicameral chambers in the world have people with both 4 and 8 (or similar numbers) term limits. Yet the problems that I described are shown in both chambers. In reality, after 4, 6 or 8 years most things have been forgotten. And the real problem doesn't come from big bad decisions that these people make but all the small decisions that benefit them as an oligarchical class over everyone else; these small decisions over the course of decades do add up and we are left in this position we are right now with complete polarization and political classes that are unable to tackle the complexity of the problems that in great part, they've created.
And yes, more people in legislatives bodies could be better; but minipublics can be summoned much more easily and you can have many of them in parallel to discuss specific issues as well which is a design that they've proposed for the canton of Vaud in Switzerland.
In any case, I think the healthiest way to go about things is not to replace our current bodies with minipublics just yet, but instead to incorporate them as a third (or second) chamber. As you've pointed out, this could have the desired effect of making elected officials behave more consequentially. Although I do think citizens assemblies through sortition are superior and should eventually replace elected officials, I'm all for a hybrid model for now; and that's actually kind of what's starting to be explored in Europe. Just look at France's efforts in the past few years as well as the Conference on the future of Europe (CoFE).
> "But also, I think you might be underestimating the amount of people required to get actual representative samples of our populations. If you look at the experiments that have been done in France, Iceland, the EU even in countries in South America; minipublics haven't really had a big problem getting enough people to participate. You might be surprised just at how much people want to be able to have an input in how politics is done in our countries."
Are these actually representative subsets in all respects, or just based on the major demographic categories?
It really depends on which experiment you look at, but the one that I know best which was the one done in Chile managed to capture a fair few demographic categories. You can be as granular as you want it really depends if you have the means to do it, and if you think about this from the state-perspective, you would most definitely be able to capture as much granularity as you wanted.
Generally, I would say though, capturing major demographic categories (age, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status) tends to be enough to produce very good outcomes. Specially when it comes to socioeconomic status which is definitely one of the biggest concerns with oligarchic politics. I mean, think about how much money and time it actually costs to run for congressman or senator.
> "Why do you say sortition for decision making would have more people opting out? What's the basis for this?"
People have a life, a career, goals, interests. How many people really want to abandon these to work in a potentially argumentative team for a political purpose?
Also, blowback from the public your decision effects.
Interesting background. I didn't know to what extent this is being tested.
I think one of the points in favor of sortition is precisely that, at least most of the designs that I've seen, tend to call for ad-hoc assemblies to discuss particular issues. To participate in these you tend to be paid and they tend to meet say 2 times a month (on the weekends) for 6 or so months.
The whole point of the citizens assemblies is to get rid of career politicians. There are many designs out there but I think almost all of them that incorporate permanent assemblies focus much more on the building of a structure rather than the building of the careers of the individuals. That is to say, they incorporate rotation in these bodies that "keeps the blood running" in a way.
The point you bring up about people having to leave their careers to become politicians is exactly what these sort of proposals try to salvage. I think right now we are kind of in a trying phase where the main question that's trying to be answered is the following: is it possible for ad-hoc assemblies to achieve similar or higher quality of deliberation as permanent elected bodies? And so far the answer is actually yes. If you're interested, there's actually a lot of info out there but reading stuff that Helene Landemore and Claudia Chwalisz have written is a very good start. I'm not really an expert in this topic but they are!
Thanks for the information and names. I'm going to look them up and read more.
I especially hope that these researchers are trying to involve those who are temperamentally disinclined to participate in social activities, as this is the demographic I feel would be most inclined to drop out of a minipublic.
> This doesn't seem to lead to good decisions being made, but when you have referendums that is top down direct democracy it seems to be, now a days, a process that can be very easily manipulated to spread misinformation.
This is a somewhat false assumption. Yes people spread misinformation. But here is the thing, the opposition also spreads misinformation. And lots of people also spread good information, or what they consider good information.
So in reality its anything but 'easy' to manipulate voting to the outcome you want.
Switzerland has been the most direct democracy for 200 years and so far we have no collapsed because of the evil demon of misinformation.
There are many easy ways prevent misinformation from being all that effective. In Switzerland, when you get a popular vote, it comes with a little bit of information from the state and each party can basically write their position on the paper. If you are not interested in the issue or becoming an expert, you can simply trust in the party you are a member of or partial to and vote as they do.
People also need to be somewhat used to direct democracy and have a real stake, voting on issues need to be common thing. If you have govenrment that is 99% a representative democracy and then once every so often something actually goes before the population you are gone get strange outcomes.
You also need to control when and how things even get to point where people can vote on things and what their options are. Should you only vote for 2 options or should a range of options be presented.
Yes, I think Switzerland does a very good job with their referendums. But Switzerland has a history of democratic and political participation that most countries do not have.
Switzerland's politics is extremely complex and it has many, many moving parts. To begin with, it's very decentralized with every canton having their own constitution and their own way of doing things; there is a canton that still passes laws by people raising their hands in the town plaza.
What you say is very important, in Switzerland the government actually makes a very important effort in being sort of the arbiter of truth and that's definitely something that governments that have undergone the referendums I mentioned didn't really do very well at all.
I'm really not saying referendums are bad, I think they can be bad if they're not done carefully and they're really not done carefully in most cases and so I believe this kind of democracy to be much more fragile than one that is sortition based. Though obviously, I think a full system incorporates many elements and referendums are a part of it; in Ireland for example, when they've had big referendums (such as abortion and gay marriage which were very divisive issues) they used mini publics to complement the range of information that was offered, they held an sortition based representative assembly that discussed the issue thoroughly and then gave an official resolution on the matter. And research actually indicates that most people that voted in the referendum were aware of the assembly and its conclusion. That's very good.
I'm very much for referendums if they're done carefully and with proper support from the state. But I think sortition is a much cleaner way to solve most problems with modern politics, though I am quite the optimistic person!
Anyway given that you're in Switzerland you should see what they've proposed for the canton of Vaud with regards to these matters.
> But Switzerland has a history of democratic and political participation that most countries do not have.
Can't have a tradition without starting.
> o begin with, it's very decentralized with every canton having their own constitution and their own way of doing things
Growing up in Switzerland is quite funny where you have people from like 30min away, who literally have a totally different school system.
Its kind of like the American system but in some ways cantons can do even more then states can in the US. The Swiss system being basically adopted from the US one but on a smaller scale. So you have cantons of 200k people that have the same power-level as California.
> sortition
That something I have not really considered much, I should study that some more.
> Anyway given that you're in Switzerland you should see what they've proposed for the canton of Vaud with regards to these matters.
Ill have to look into that.
I know there is a secessionist movement where villages are moving from Bern (Bern was the war monger expansionist part of the Old Confederacy) to Vaud but that might be unrelated.
I think this will eventually be unnecessary. Delegation solves the problem that interaction is costly. But with modern AI trained on my opinions, it could conceivably take normative positions and then only inform me when it's something I care about.
Then you can have it act on your behalf normally and notify you when it's something you care about.
Instead of trying to tweak how we select the people that want to control every aspect of our lives, we simply reduce the power the state has to do so? The less power the machine has, the fewer incentives there are to get control of it, and the less damage is done when the wrong people do so.
Because that's not what they (the machine, not any particular persons or parties) are using to do most of their ill. The weapons most often wielded against the citizens who get uppity aren't rifles and batons, but the media and financial institutions, and centralisation in general. Alternative decentralised and temporary systems built on math are the answer.
Because organizations don't have power, people do. And peoples individual power is always limited by making their actions depended on the consent of other people. And then those other people require consent of even more people and so on.
The idea that decision making in a democracy is some definable optimization problem that "experts" can solve better than the average voter, or that the very purpose of democratic decision making is to optimize anything in the first place is laughably naive.
Any non-trivial decision that must be made in a democracy is made amongst a set of choices with outcomes that are incomparable to one another in a single objective domain.
For instance: should we raise taxes? If the question were simply to optimize how much money we can raise, then yes, the question could be modeled as an optimization problem; the outcome of each possible choice will be some amount of tax revenue that can be ranked.
But rather, the question is should we be raising taxes or should we be lowering them. There are no outcomes to be compared here, but rather - generously - philosophies to be debated or - cynically - power struggles to be played out.
When there is no objective way to rank the outcomes of a set of decisions "expert" opinion is of little value.
I think you’re vastly overestimating the average voter. I would recommend reading Caplan’s “The Myth of the Rational Voter”; it’s a rather bracing book.
> Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.
It feels like it's denying the two-way relation between voters and politicians, and in particular the influence of political actors on voter views.
Or from the conclusion
> recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.
I'm not really making a claim that the average voter is "as good" as an expert when voting. Rather I'm saying it's often not possible to optimize anything in the context of voting, so the degree of someone's expertise in some domain is really not relevant to begin with.
What prevents someone from just buying someone's delegation in liquid democracy? If you were destitute, someone buying your vote might sound like a pretty good deal...
Well, only kind of right? You can tell someone one thing then totally just go into the polling booth and vote for someone else, but liquid democracy means you literally just transferred your vote to someone else.
Well, except for the part about mail in ballots. You can sell your ballot and signed envelope to a person so they can guarantee the vote is cast the way they want.
The German initiative/cooperative "aula" already implemented liquid democracy / delegated voting software in schools for several years, as part of building a culture of participation in schools. Great results so far. https://www.aula.de/was-ist-aula/liquid-democracy/
If i understand it correctly, there seems to be a big problem in the design of the evaluation. Namely the assumption that you only have to identify expert voices. That sounds great for simple and isolated problems, but those are not the ones we are facing today. We live in a complex system were every expert has a very narrow perspective and problems are too complex for any one individual to grasp all relevant aspects of.
The difficulty is not finding the one person that is competent enough to fix the problem for you but finding someone that is able and willing to create a process/environment in which the relevant perspectives/expert opinions are collected and a cooperative solution is found (to address the relevant perspectives on the problem).
By voting or delegating for a solution finding process instead the selection of one solution you overcome the "everyone needs to be an expert and inertia / disinterest sets in" problem identified here.
tldr: I believe the study tests for compatibility to a non-functioning legacy/simplified approach to decision making.
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edit: From the paper
>The first experiment was designed for the lab and follows the theory very closely. We study groups of either 5 voters (of which 1 is an expert) or 15 voters (of which 3 are experts). We observe the frequency of delegation and the fraction of group decisions that yield the correct outcome.
>Our second experiment then is meant to capture a voting environment where voters have “some sense” of how well-informed they are and how likely they are to be correct, and similarly of how likely experts are to be correct, but such sense is vague and instinctive.
The assumption that you have to simply identify the person that has the correct solution is fundamentally flawed.
Biggest threat to democracy is moral panics about fake enemies instigated by politicians (specifically, demagogues). This helps with that by replacing politicians with direct democracy. It's more feasible than full-on direct democracy since it avoids the need for everyone to become an expert on every legal area. You can delegate your vote to a non-politician expert you know personally - and to different people depending on the proposal.
Even if we agree that this is the biggest threat (in fact I think echo chambers are not a problem — as long as the ideas echoing around them match my preferences, haha!), I’m not sure why we’d evaluate these experiment by that metric. Maybe they are trying to solve some other problem.
Some people amassed a small bunch of delegations while the system was new and interesting, then usage dropped off. Since the delegations didn't expire, individual votes didn't matter - these "super delegates" had so much voting power that they'd generally outvote the remaining active users of the system. Combine this with the high cost of participating yourself (you need to repeatedly inform yourself and engage with the system) compared to delegation (just pick a person that seems reasonable once and forget it).
The lack of having any meaningful voice further discouraged people from participating, both in the system and the party as a whole. It sounds good in theory, but I'm not sure this practical hurdle can be overcome. There will usually be a majority of mostly passive users, and the corrective power of Liquid Democracy ignores this and assumes users change their vote if their delegate votes against their interest.
The Swiss system (a sufficiently large group of people can initiate a referendum or popular initiative, then the matter is put to a one-person-one-vote vote) seems like a very practical solution to the problem where you want the "boring" decisions handled by someone else, while keeping them in check and allowing controversial decisions to be overturned.