Liquid Democracy was tried in practice in the Pirate Party of Germany.
Some people amassed a small bunch of delegations while the system was new and interesting, then usage dropped off. Since the delegations didn't expire, individual votes didn't matter - these "super delegates" had so much voting power that they'd generally outvote the remaining active users of the system. Combine this with the high cost of participating yourself (you need to repeatedly inform yourself and engage with the system) compared to delegation (just pick a person that seems reasonable once and forget it).
The lack of having any meaningful voice further discouraged people from participating, both in the system and the party as a whole. It sounds good in theory, but I'm not sure this practical hurdle can be overcome. There will usually be a majority of mostly passive users, and the corrective power of Liquid Democracy ignores this and assumes users change their vote if their delegate votes against their interest.
The Swiss system (a sufficiently large group of people can initiate a referendum or popular initiative, then the matter is put to a one-person-one-vote vote) seems like a very practical solution to the problem where you want the "boring" decisions handled by someone else, while keeping them in check and allowing controversial decisions to be overturned.
The German pirate party was pure chaos, was created rapidly and fell of quickly even outside of the liquid democracy system. and I don't think its fair to blame all of this on the platform.
> The lack of having any meaningful voice further discouraged people from participating, both in the system and the party as a whole.
Yeah but people participate in regular democracy all the time where you have even less voice.
So people participate if they think its important enough.
In the German system you just had a lot of very passive members that initially selected from a really small group and the system never got beyond that.
The party as a whole collapsed because it had a hugely broad range of people in it that were unified only on one topic, discussion on anything else basically went know-where.
> There will usually be a majority of mostly passive users, and the corrective power of Liquid Democracy ignores this and assumes users change their vote if their delegate votes against their interest.
The actual implementation can also do a lot of change this depending on how it is implemented. How much power do you delegate. Do you delegate all power or only for a certain topics and so on.
> The Swiss system (a sufficiently large group of people can initiate a referendum or popular initiative, then the matter is put to a one-person-one-vote vote) seems like a very practical solution to the problem where you want the "boring" decisions handled by someone else, while keeping them in check and allowing controversial decisions to be overturned.
Being from Switzerland, that system has a lot to recommend it, but also has problems. There is certainty much further to go.
It seems to me you are coming down to hard on the whole concept. Some kind of system where I can somehow give away power to somebody that represents me is always required. How to do that in a good way is the question.
1) That sounds like a "nudge" i.e. you're already manipulating the system to encourage your preferred outcome.*
2) Also, how are you going to get something like that passed without the agreement of the delegates?
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[*] It's like when states send out arbitrary letters to welfare recipients that have to be signed and sent back within X days just to knock people off the rolls who aren't paying attention to the mail or are afraid of or don't understand the form.
> you're already manipulating the system to encourage your preferred outcome.
That is a very one sided look at it. Any system encourages something.
If you make improvements simply to make the overall system operate better then its not manipulation towards a better outcome.
> Also, how are you going to get something like that passed without the agreement of the delegates?
That is literally the problem any system of democracy has. Every system of democracy has some established initial rules and must evolve from there. Those that have good initial rules tend to evolve better but many things have an effect.
And you do it the same way in liquid system as in any other system, politics. You try to find a group that supports it for some reason, even for not the same reason. You get together those that have not delegated, you mobilize those that have delegated and try to inform them that their delegate is changing their interest and you find some that already have 'super' status that they could actually gain votes in that are now tied up 'bad' delegates.
Of course all evolution of rules in democracy is always a huge bitch but that doesn't make liquid democracy systems different form other systems.
And just like with every other system of democracy it makes sense to establish best practices and it makes sense to learn and improve the system over time. When somebody knew wants to use it they have a better starting point.
So the second point is kind of pointless, just because some improvement maybe wouldn't be adopted in an already existing system doesn't mean its not a worthy improvement. Just as we know Range voting would be have huge improvement over existing voting systems. Nobody sane today would design a first past the post voting system with single delegate districts.
> "2) Also, how are you going to get something like that passed without the agreement of the delegates?"
Why would the vast majority of minority delegates be incentivized to let the few delegates with plurality (but not majority) power automatically keep their delegations?
I believe that was eventually introduced, but too little too late. It doesn't fix the asymmetry which makes direct participation a rather theoretical possibility.
Wouldn't the Swiss system also encourage controversial decisions to be rapidly validated by a majority? Part of the supposed appeal of representative government is to prevent the rabble for voting for free bread and no taxes, right?
You'd think, but time and time again, the "rabble" votes against it's own interest. We had an initiative for 6 weeks holidays - shot down. We had other good (IMO) initiatives on UBI, Healthcare, you name it - shot down. The system is quite stable and is also not immune to lobbying and fearmongering. It seems both qualities can be true at the same time.
Maybe you just have difference on opinion what their own interest is. Its pretty rich to presume that you know what in the best interest of everybody is.
Just saying its all because of fearmongering and to stupidity of the plebs is an elitists attitude that I dislike.
Of course lobbying has an effect. That literally what democracy is built on. Lobbying is effective also in things that you like, not just those that you dislike.
We also had a lot of initiatives that were accompanied by lots of fearmongering (vote for this or country if fucked) that were rejected.
A common objection against the use of these platforms is the delegation system, where a user can delegate his vote to another user, giving rise to so-called super-voters, i.e. powerful users who receive many delegations. It has been asserted in the past that the presence of these super-voters undermines the democratic process, and therefore delegative democracy should be avoided. In this paper, we look at the emergence of super-voters in the largest delegative online democracy platform worldwide, operated by Germany's Pirate Party. We investigate the distribution of power within the party systematically, study whether super-voters exist, and explore the influence they have on the outcome of votings conducted online. While we find that the theoretical power of super-voters is indeed high, we also observe that they use their power wisely.
The Related Work section may also be of interest for you.
Are you aware of any research specifically into the risk of demotivating people who expect the ability to participate directly, but are then facing a situation where e.g. a single superdelegate can nix an initiative (this is a possibility I saw mentioned in the Jabbusch analysis)?
I'd be interested to know how much of that is just my own perception vs. what the actual data says.
In the sense of explicit research into this? Not much, especially I'm not aware of anything regarding the demotivational effect of having individual votes stand directly against superdelegate votes.
If you are just looking for information on the system in general, look for "Liquid Democracy", "Piratenpartei", "Liquid Feedback" (the name of the system used), and "LQFB" (acronym for the previous). Most of the info will be in German though.
https://www.sebastianjabbusch.de/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/... is probably the most thorough analysis you'll find, but the survey results have (according to the study itself) strong biases towards active members, the two surveys used different wording for questions so you can't make out trends, and it often commingles Liquid Democracy, the tool used, and direct participation in the party overall, which can make it hard to attribute answers to Liquid Democracy (IIRC it wasn't ever used in a binding manner).
Regarding the biases, 65% of survey participants claim they don't use delegations (page 156 by the numbering of the PDF), page 110 and following shows how high the percentage of delegated vs. direct votes was.
Some people amassed a small bunch of delegations while the system was new and interesting, then usage dropped off. Since the delegations didn't expire, individual votes didn't matter - these "super delegates" had so much voting power that they'd generally outvote the remaining active users of the system. Combine this with the high cost of participating yourself (you need to repeatedly inform yourself and engage with the system) compared to delegation (just pick a person that seems reasonable once and forget it).
The lack of having any meaningful voice further discouraged people from participating, both in the system and the party as a whole. It sounds good in theory, but I'm not sure this practical hurdle can be overcome. There will usually be a majority of mostly passive users, and the corrective power of Liquid Democracy ignores this and assumes users change their vote if their delegate votes against their interest.
The Swiss system (a sufficiently large group of people can initiate a referendum or popular initiative, then the matter is put to a one-person-one-vote vote) seems like a very practical solution to the problem where you want the "boring" decisions handled by someone else, while keeping them in check and allowing controversial decisions to be overturned.