Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

The Future of Economic Design pp 59–66Cite as

Interactive Democracy: New Challenges for Social Choice Theory

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Studies in Economic Design ((DESI))

Abstract

Interactive Democracy (aka e-democracy or digital democracy) is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of approaches to make collective decision making processes more engaging and responsive. A common goal of these approaches is to utilize modern information technology—in particular, the Internet—in order to enable more interactive decision making processes. An integral part of many interactive democracy proposals are online decision platforms that provide much more flexibility and interaction possibilities than traditional democratic systems. This is achieved by embracing the novel paradigm of delegative voting, often referred to as liquid democracy, which aims to reconcile the idealistic appeal of direct democracy with the practicality of representative democracy. The successful design of interactive democracy systems presents a multidisciplinary research challenge; one important aspect concerns the elicitation and aggregation of preferences. In this article, I argue that the emergence of online decision platforms and other interactive democracy systems leads to new challenges for social choice theory.

An extended version of this article has appeared in the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (Brill 2018).

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   139.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   179.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   179.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    DemocracyOS has since been superseded by Sovereign, developed by the Democracy Earth Foundation (http://www.democracy.earth).

  2. 2.

    http://www.interaktive-demokratie.org/index.en.html.

  3. 3.

    The field is lacking a unified terminology. For example, Interactive Democracy is sometimes referred to as iDemocracy (Carswell 2012) or participatory democracy (Aragonès and Sánchez-Pagés 2009). The terms liquid democracy and delegative democracy usually refer to the paradigm of delegative voting (see Sect. ). And terms like e-democracy (Shapiro 2018), digital democracy (Hague and Loader 1999), and Internet democracy (Margolis and Moreno-Riaño 2013) emphasize the role of information technology.

  4. 4.

    Notable exceptions are websites like Spliddit (Goldman and Procaccia 2014) and RoboVote (http://robovote.org).

  5. 5.

    For details, see the articles by Ford (2002), Green-Armytage (2015), and Blum and Zuber (2016). Some of the ideas behind delegative voting can be traced back to the works of Dodgson (1884), Tullock (1967), and Miller (1969). For an historical overview of ideas, see the surveys by Ford (2014) and Behrens (2017).

  6. 6.

    The question whether the delegative voting paradigm actually leads to “superior” voting outcomes (as compared to direct and representative democracy) has been addressed from a variety of perspectives (Alger 2006; Green-Armytage 2015; Cohensius et al. 2017; Kahng et al. 2018; Gölz et al. 2018; Kling et al. 2015).

  7. 7.

    Identifying reasonable formats in which voters can express their preferences has similarities to the search for bidding languages in combinatorial auctions (Nisan 2006).

  8. 8.

    Other approaches towards participatory budgeting have been proposed by Fain et al. (2016), Shapiro and Talmon (2018), and Aziz et al. (2018), among others.

References

  • Alger, D. (2006). Voting by proxy. Public Choice, 126(1–2), 1–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aragonès, E., & Sánchez-Pagés, S. (2009). A theory of participatory democracy based on the real case of Porto Alegre. European Economic Review, 53(1), 56–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aziz, H., Lee, B. E., & Talmon, N. (2018). Proportionally representative participatory budgeting: Axioms and algorithms. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) (pp. 23–31). IFAAMAS.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aziz, H., Brill, M., Conitzer, V., Elkind, E., Freeman, R., & Walsh, T. (2017). Justified representation in approval-based committee voting. Social Choice and Welfare, 48(2), 461–485.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Behrens, J. (2017). The origins of liquid democracy. The Liquid Democracy Journal, 5, 7–17.

    Google Scholar 

  • Behrens, J., Kistner, A., Nitsche, A., & Swierczek, B. (2014). The Principles of LiquidFeedback.

    Google Scholar 

  • Benade, G., Nath, S., Procaccia, A. D., & Shah, N. (2017). Preference elicitation for participatory budgeting. Proceedings of the 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (pp. 376–382). AAAI Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blum, C., & Zuber, C. I. (2016). Liquid democracy: Potentials, problems, and perspectives. Journal of Political Philosophy, 24(2), 162–182.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boella, G., Francis, L., Grassi, E., Kistner, A., Nitsche, A., Noskov, A., et al. (2018). WeGovNow: A map based platform to engage the local civic society. WWW 2018: Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018 (pp. 1215–1219). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brandt, F., Conitzer, V., Endriss, U., Lang, J., & Procaccia, A. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook of computational social choice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brill, M. (2018). Interactive democracy. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) Blue Sky Ideas track (pp. 1183–1187). IFAAMAS.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brill, M., & Talmon, N. (2018). Pairwise liquid democracy. Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (pp. 137–143). IJCAI.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cabannes, Y. (2004). Participatory budgeting: A significant contribution to participatory democracy. Environment and Urbanization, 16(1), 27–46.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carswell, D. (2012). The end of politics and the birth of iDemocracy. Biteback Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chamberlin, J. R., & Courant, P. N. (1983). Representative deliberations and representative decisions: Proportional representation and the Borda rule. The American Political Science Review, 77(3), 718–733.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Christoff, Z., & Grossi, D. (2017). Binary voting with delegable proxy: An analysis of liquid democracy. Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK) (pp. 134–150).

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohensius, G., Mannor, S., Meir, R., Meirom, E., & Orda, A. (2017). Proxy voting for better outcomes. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) (pp. 858–866). IFAAMAS.

    Google Scholar 

  • Conitzer, V., Brill, M., & Freeman, R. (2015). Crowdsourcing societal tradeoffs. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) Blue Sky Ideas Track (pp. 1213–1217). IFAAMAS.

    Google Scholar 

  • DeGroot, M. H. (1974). Reaching a consensus. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 69(345), 118–121.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dodgson, C. L. (1884). The principles of parliamentary representation. Harrison and Sons.

    Google Scholar 

  • Elkind, E., & Slinko, A. (2016). Rationalizations of voting rules. In F. Brandt, V. Conitzer, U. Endriss, J. Lang, & A. D. Procaccia (Eds.), Handbook of Computational Social Choice (pp. 169–196). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chap. 8.

    Google Scholar 

  • Endriss, U. (Ed.). (2017). Trends in computational social choice. AI Access.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fain, B., Goel, A., & Munagala, K. (2016). The core of the participatory budgeting problem. Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE) (pp. 384–399)., Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

    Google Scholar 

  • Fishburn, P. C. (1974). Paradoxes of voting. The American Political Science Review, 68(2), 537–546.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ford, B. (2002). Delegative democracy. Unpublished manuscript. http://www.brynosaurus.com/deleg/deleg.pdf.

  • Ford, B. (2014). Delegative democracy revisited. Blog post. http://bford.github.io/2014/11/16/deleg.html.

  • Goel, A., Krishnaswamy, A. K., Sakshuwong, S., & Aitamurto, T. (2016). Knapsack voting: Voting mechanisms for participatory budgeting. Unpublished manuscript.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldman, J., & Procaccia, A. D. (2014). Spliddit: Unleashing fair division algorithms. SIGecom Exchanges, 13(2), 41–46.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gölz, P., Kahng, A., Mackenzie, S., & Procaccia, A. D. (2018). The fluid mechanics of liquid democracy. In Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE) (Vol. 11316, pp. 188–202), Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grandi, U. (2017). Social choice and social networks. In U. Endriss (Ed.), Trends in Computational Social Choice (pp. 169–184). AI Access. Chap. 9.

    Google Scholar 

  • Green-Armytage, J. (2015). Direct voting and proxy voting. Constitutional Political Economy, 26(2), 190–220.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hague, B. N., & Loader, B. D. (Eds.). (1999). Digital democracy: discourse and decision making in the information age. Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kahng, A., Mackenzie, S., & Procaccia, A. D. (2018). Liquid democracy: An algorithmic perspective. Proceedings of the 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (pp. 1095–1102). AAAI Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kling, C. C., Kunegis, J., Hartmann, H., Strohmaier, M., & Staab, S. (2015). Voting behaviour and power in online democracy: A study of LiquidFeedback in Germany’s Pirate Party. Proceedings of the 9th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) (pp. 208–217). AAAI Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lang, J., & Xia, L. (2016). Voting in combinatorial domains. In F. Brandt, V. Conitzer, U. Endriss, J. Lang, & A. D. Procaccia (Eds.), Handbook of Computational Social Choice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chap. 9.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mancini, P. (2014). How to upgrade democracy for the internet era [video file]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era.

  • Mancini, P. (2015). Why it is time to redesign our political system. European View, 14(1), 69–75.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Margolis, M., & Moreno-Riaño, G. (2013). The prospect of internet democracy. Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, J. C. (1969). A program for direct and proxy voting in the legislative process. Public Choice, 7(1), 107–113.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Monroe, B. L. (1995). Fully proportional representation. The American Political Science Review, 89(4), 925–940.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nisan, N. (2006). Bidding languages for combinatorial auctions. In P. Cramton, Y. Shoham, & R. Steinberg (Eds.), Combinatorial Auctions. MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shapiro, E., & Talmon, N. (2018). A participatory democratic budgeting algorithm. Technical report. http://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05839v6.

  • Shapiro, E. (2018). Point: Foundations of e-democracy. Communications of the ACM, 61(8), 31–34.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Skowron, P., Lackner, M., Brill, M., Peters, D., & Elkind, E. (2017). Proportional rankings. Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (pp. 409–415). IJCAI.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tullock, G. (1967). Towards a mathematics of politics. University of Michigan Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, B., & Zhou, H. (2017). Brief announcement: Statement voting and liquid democracy. Proceedings of the 36th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) (pp. 359–361). ACM.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by a Feodor Lynen research fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under grant BR 4744/2-1. The author would like to thank Dorothea Baumeister, Jan Behrens, Steven Brams, Vincent Conitzer, Paul Gölz, Umberto Grandi, Davide Grossi, Michel Le Breton, Rolf Niedermeier, Dominik Peters, Marcus Pivato, Ariel Procaccia, Ehud Shapiro, Nimrod Talmon, and Bill Zwicker for helpful comments.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Markus Brill

Authors
  1. Markus Brill
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Markus Brill .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS - Paris School of Economics, Paris, France

    Jean-François Laslier

  2. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Hervé Moulin

  3. Université Paris-Dauphine, Université PSL, CNRS, LAMSADE, Paris, France

    M. Remzi Sanver

  4. Union College, Schenectady, NY, USA

    William S. Zwicker

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Brill, M. (2019). Interactive Democracy: New Challenges for Social Choice Theory. In: Laslier, JF., Moulin, H., Sanver, M., Zwicker, W. (eds) The Future of Economic Design. Studies in Economic Design. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18050-8_10

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation