Newsletter: Decisions and power: In politics, business, law, and more
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared in our web3 newsletter — a guide to trending topics in crypto with takes and resources from engineers, researchers, and the a16z crypto team. Subscribe to see it in your inbox weekly.
This special edition, leading into the United States July 4th Independence Day, is all about designing optimal political institutions. It’s a topic that spans not just politics, but business, law, policy, and beyond. Some of the key questions here include how to design durable governance structures, allocate decision-making power, and effectively coordinate various actors — whether in a political group or school board or online platform.
But real-world systems can take hundreds of years to study… And despite significant progress, testing theories and gathering data in those settings remains difficult. Now, however, we have a whole new venue — a “laboratory for democracy” — where we can:
- learn more about the effects of constitutional designs on political outcomes;
- intervene and change institutional designs more frequently and more deliberately;
- observe the consequences in actual communities thanks to the openness of blockchain data; and
- iterate and improve designs based on that data much sooner than later.
That new laboratory, ripe for exactly this kind of experimentation, is web3 governance. The pieces from us that follow cover this important trend and theme… We’d argue that this moment is not unlike the moment when more people came online with the advent of the web, web2, and social media — creating a new field of computational social science with implications for social and organizational networks, collective dynamics of human systems, and much more.
Using decentralized autonomous organizations to study political institutions, and behavior, at scale
by Andrew Hall and Eliza Oak
How to design optimal political institutions? We’ve been working on the problem for about 2200 years, and the answers are still subject to much study and debate. And while political scientists and economists have developed many important theories about which constitutional changes lead to which outcomes, these theories — however convincing — are hard to confirm. We can only test them when we find matching historical conditions and can collect the necessary data. We’ve made remarkable progress despite these challenges, developing deep bodies of research around questions like the differences between presidential and parliamentary systems and the impact of term limits, term length, politician compensation, and many other design features on democratic accountability and representation.
But we could learn much more about the effects of constitutional designs on political outcomes if we could intervene and change institutional designs more frequently and more deliberately. For obvious reasons, no government or polity wants us to experimentally intervene, even with the best intentions. Now, however, online platforms in web3 allow us to design, test, and redesign political systems for online communities… with implications for the physical world, too. So in this piece, the authors share more on DAOs as constitutional laboratories, as well as insights from the case study of Optimism airdrops.
A roadmap for researching and experimenting with governance
by Andrew Hall and Eliza Oak
Drawing on our recent work — a massive online governance experiment which led to insights on what kinds of incentives encourage participation in democracy — we share a short list of some other experiments that could address many foundational questions.
For each topic, we summarize the issue and provide concrete questions that some projects are already starting to explore, and where builders could harness insights. These include:
- understanding voter turnout
- empowering good actors in governance
- designing strong institutions
- improving political representation
- tracing strategic behavior among political actors
📄 see also: this paper [link to pdf download]
Debating the nuances: Governing democracy, the internet, and boardrooms
with Andrew Hall, Noah Feldman, and Robert Hackett
Who gets to decide what, and for whom? Governance is one of the trickiest challenges people have faced, from ancient city-states to recent AI startups. Expert guests take us on a tour of the field’s big ideas, lessons learned in practice, and the most exciting experiments happening today on the latest episode of the web3 with a16z podcast.
The hallway-style discussion features Andrew Hall, coauthor of the posts and papers referenced above, professor of political science at Stanford, and consultant to a16z crypto research; and Noah Feldman, constitutional law professor at Harvard who architected the Meta oversight board, wartime interim constitutions, and more; both in conversation with a16z crypto editor Robert Hackett.
The conversation goes from the politics of nations, to the dynamics (and dysfunctions) of corporate and university boards… to sharing hopes for blockchain-based DAOs and beyond. The experts also touch on content moderation and community standards; best practices for citizens assemblies; courts vs. legislatures; the history and evolution of democracy — and examples of governance, from big companies like Meta to startups like Anthropic.
🔀 share
More resources on governance from us:
📖 What we can learn from the history of governance
🎧 On the decentralized web, truth, human rights (with Jonathan Dotan)
📖 Avoiding governance attacks in DAOs
▶️ Presenting preliminary data on the above digital quasi-experiment
📚 Principles for fixing decentralized governance: part 1 | part 2
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