What Kinds of Incentives Encourage Participation in Democracy? Evidence from a Massive Online Governance Experiment

Andrew B. Hall and Eliza R. Oak
Additional contact information
Andrew B. Hall: Stanford U
Eliza R. Oak: Yale U

Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business

Abstract: How can we democratically govern the AI, social media, and online platforms of the future? Today, low participation is a major barrier to community governance online. We leverage a digital quasi-experiment that allows us to study the links between incentives and political participation at a scale and granularity not previously possible. We focus on a web3 startup called Optimism that distributed digital tokens worth roughly $28 million USD to more than 300,000 active participants in its governance system as part of a sequence of rewards meant to encourage long-run engagement. Studying 1.2 million unique wallet addresses, we find that the reward scheme induces new users to participate in Optimism's governance, has larger effects for smaller token holders, and leads voters to spread their votes across delegates more widely. Together, the results suggest that reward schemes that give people a durable stake in the community and promise a sequence of future rewards are able to broaden participation in online democracy noticeably, at least in the short run under the proper conditions.

Date: 2023-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-pay and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/work ... n-democracy-evidence

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:stabus:4130

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().