Directness and Popular Sovereignty in Liquid Democracy

• In Event: Innovations in Democratic Theory

Abstract

Liquid democracy is one of the latest additions to the family of democratic innovations. Although scholars agree with the broad characterization of liquid democracy as a mixture of direct and representative democracy, a significant portion of the existing literature tends towards comparing liquid democracy with existing ideals of “direct democracy.” For example, several scholars in the computational social sciences have focused on testing, via computer simulations, whether a group of people reaches epistemically superior decisions when all its members vote directly on issues relative to when they are allowed to delegate to proxies. Yet, it is unclear why this comparison is preferable to the one with “representative democracy.” More importantly, few have unpacked what directness in liquid democracy is all about.

The present manuscript aims to fill in this gap and provide an analysis of directness in liquid democracy from the perspective of normative democratic theory. Liquid democracy is defined here as a collective decision-making or voting system characterized by the principles of voluntary delegation and proxy representation. Under a liquid voting scheme, each citizen can choose to either cast a ballot on any given public policy issue, or to pass on the vote to someone else and be represented by a so-called proxy. This means that, for every binding collective decision at stake, a portion of the citizenry ranging anywhere from zero to one may be casting ballots directly. Whenever it does not converge to the former, fully representative endpoint, liquid voting is therefore “direct” because it allows for participation in binding collective decision-making by at least a subset of ordinary citizens and without intermediation during the act of voting.

In this sense, however, liquid voting is not the only direct democratic process or institution available to us. Building on the existing literature on direct democracy, the manuscript compares liquid voting against the neighboring ideas of open governing assemblies (such as the Greek Ekklesia, New England’s town meetings, or the Swiss Landsgemeinde) and of popular votes (in particular, facultative referendums and popular initiatives). The aim of this discussion is to highlight the unique ways in which the concept of liquid democracy realizes directness, incorporating principles and values from the existing literature on direct democracy. It starts with a survey of the notions of the assembled people and popular sovereignty, two concepts often dismissed even in modern participatory theories of democracy. Liquid voting assigns a primary governing role to the assembled citizen body, which has the final say over public policy issues and, in this specific sense, is sovereign. The analysis then moves on to the concepts of self-selection and volunteerism. These two ideas are essential because they allow those who wish to participate in the voting to do so, while also permitting those who prefer to opt out of the voting to delegate their vote to proxies. In this sense, self-selection modulates the relationship between directness and representation in liquid voting. Finally, the discussion highlights the new temporal dimension introduced by liquid voting, whereby citizens may participate in policymaking on different policy issues and at different times. In this sense, liquid voting introduces a diachronic perspective akin to the idea of rotation in lottocratic systems.

Overall, the manuscript concludes that liquid democracy provides a very promising framework for scholars interested in redesigning existing democratic institutions, for it brings popular sovereignty explicitly to the forefront without neglecting the necessity of political representation in large-scale, complex societies.

Note that this is an excerpt from a book manuscript on liquid democracy (Chapter 4). This is the first of three chapters in Part II: A Liquid Conception of Democracy, which together aim to develop a normative theory of liquid democracy.

Author

• Chiara Valsangiacomo, University College Dublin