Flexible Representative Democracy: An Introduction with Binary Issues
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We introduce Flexible Representative Democracy (FRD), a novel hybrid of Representative Democracy (RD) and Direct Democracy (DD), in which voters can alter the issue-dependent weights of a set of elected representatives. In line with the literature on Interactive Democracy, our model allows the voters to actively determine the degree to which the democracy is direct versus representative. However, unlike Liquid Democracy, FRD uses strictly non-transitive delegations, making delegation cycles impossible, and maintains a fixed set of accountable elected representatives. We present FRD and analyze it using a computational approach with issues that are binary and symmetric; we compare the outcomes of various democratic systems using Direct Democracy with majority voting as an ideal baseline. First, we demonstrate the shortcomings of Representative Democracy. We provide NP-Hardness results for electing an ideal set of representatives, discuss pathologies, and demonstrate empirically that common polynomial-time multi-winner election rules for selecting representatives do not perform well in expectation. To analyze the behavior of FRD, we begin by providing theoretical results on how issue-specific delegations determine outcomes. Finally, we provide empirical results comparing the outcomes of RD with fixed sets of proxies across issues versus FRD with issue-specific delegations. Our results show that variants of Proxy Voting yield no discernible benefit over RD and reveal the potential for FRD to improve outcomes as voter participation increases, further motivating the use of issue-specific delegations.
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