Liquid democracy in the wild
Liquid democracy is an oft-discussed idea for how to use technology to enable a new form of representative democracy. How well does it work, in the wild? Andrew Hall (Stanford) takes advantage of a novel setting on the internet in which blockchain startups use digital voting to make high-stakes collective decisions. He collected data covering more than 250,000 voters and more than 1,700 proposals across 18 voting entities (DAOs) in web3. Roughly 17% of tokens are delegated to representatives, on average. These delegations are primarily bottoms-up; smaller token-holders are more likely to delegate than larger token- holders. Delegates who vote more regularly are more likely to receive more delegated votes, suggesting that delegation decisions may be somewhat informed. Finally, he uses a difference- in-differences design to estimate the causal effect of DAOs building user interfaces that make it easy to delegate tokens, finding evidence that this intervention increases rates of delegation and, in turn, increases overall rates of voting.
Taken together, the results suggest that liquid democracy can sustain meaningful amounts of bottoms-up participation, especially when the informational costs of participating are brought down. Nevertheless, in contrast to theoretical concerns about over-delegation, the most basic obstacle to liquid democracy remains generally low rates of participation.
This is joint work with Sho Miyazaki.
About the presenter
Andy is the Davies Family Professor and Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Hall’s research team uses large-scale quantitative data and cutting-edge methods from econometrics, statistics, and computer science to study how to build better-functioning systems of governance.
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