Fluid Democracy: An Alternative Approach to Decision-Making in Democracy

Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - 4:00pm to 4:30pm

Event Calendar Category

LIDS & Stats Tea

Speaker Name

Manon Revel

Affiliation

IDSS / LIDS

Zoom meeting id

910 4195 4467

Join Zoom meeting

https://mit.zoom.us/j/91041954467

Abstract

Fluid democracy is a decision-making process that was proposed in the 60s as an alternative to direct democracy and representative democracy. It relies on letting agents choose between voting themselves and transitively delegating their votes to better-informed agents in their neighbourhood. While fluid democracy has been seen as a system that could combine the best aspects of direct and representative democracies, it could also result in concentration of powers in the hands of a few. In fact, real-world implementations of fluid democracy already did. In this work, we investigate conditions on the delegation mechanism and on the graph that would limit concentration of power.

Joint work with Daniel Haplern, Ariel Procaccia, Joe Halpern, Elchanan Mossel and Ali Jadbabaie.

 

Biography

Manon is a PhD student in IDSS, advised by Ali Jadbabaie and Munther Dahleh. Her research interests are broadly in news credibility and political behaviors, with a recent focus on electoral systems.