Representation and Intensity of Preferences: A Public Economics Analysis of Liquid Democracy

Philémon Poux ()
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Philémon Poux: CRED - Centre de Recherche en Economie et Droit - Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, CERSA - Centre d'Études et de Recherches de Sciences Administratives et Politiques - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Institut Cujas - Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées

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Abstract: Following an increasingly large corpus of literature championing blockchain-based voting systems and, in particular, Liquid Democracy, this paper proposes a theoretical analysis based on public economics on the issue completing the current literature which focuses more on technical issues. Differentiating between Liquid Democracy as a voting tool and as a new form of democracy, I argue that the former offers the opportunity to vote for more inclusive decisions and to better reflect voters's intensity of preferences delegation and logrolling. However, the latter does not benefit from these positive outcomes as it faces major limitations at large scales because it fails to provide a framework for bundling and for legislative work. In this paper, I conclude that reaches the conclusion that, for now, Liquid Democracy is more suited to local democracy or small-scale homogeneous groups than to larger-scale systems (such as national constitutions). Along the paper, I discuss blockchain-based examples of Liquid Democracy to illustrate the analysis and link it with recent literature.

Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-des, nep-pay and nep-pol
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