Liquid democracy: two experiments on delegation in voting
nber.org
nber.org
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
Large farms and capital owners don't strike me as the "rabble".
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.
From the abstract:
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.
I'd be interested to know how much of that is just my own perception vs. what the actual data says.
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.
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.
Isn’t part of being an expert recognising expertise?
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.
So there is already a certain selection bias in who would even become an expert and why.
edit: (I feel like Walter Lippmann went over all of this already in The Phantom Public, and came up with no good answers.)
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!
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.
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.
Democracy is really whole can of worms.
> "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 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
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)
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.
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.
"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.
Ok thanks for this....it doesn't make it make sense, but it's useful to know where people's errors lie.
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.
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).
We have a Congress, which is a (highly viscous) form of liquid democracy. Are you worried about Congress having fake votes?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Nothing about liquid or direct democracy is about electronic voting.
Here in Switzerland some cantons literally do direct democracy by hand raising to decide on government issues.
Both direct and liquid democracy can be conducted with paper.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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).
> "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.
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).
Are these actually representative subsets in all respects, or just based on the major demographic categories?
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
Then you can have it act on your behalf normally and notify you when it's something you care about.
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.
> 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.
At least we know what we're in for.
This is, of course, why the US constitution originally restricted the franchise rather quite a bit. Are you in favor of that then?
This is an oft-overlooked downside to mail-in ballots. (I still broadly support them.)
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.
So never?