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

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.