Ade, Michelini & Vigiani (2022), Proportionality in Liquid Democracy and Representative Democracy

Proceedings of the ESSLLI 2022 Student Session

Proportionality in Liquid Democracy and Representative Democracy

Leyla Ade, Matteo Michelini and Pietro Vigiani

In this paper, we compare liquid democracy to representative democracy with respect to a proportionality principle, according to which agents with higher stakes should have more voting weight. We provide a formal model of voting systems that models agents' uncertainty towards a voting issue as influenced by stakes in the issue. We formalise the delegation process in representative democracy and liquid democracy and prove that only the latter satisfies the proportionality principle.