Liquid Democracy, Direct Democracy & Representative Democracy
Vložit
- čas přidán 2. 08. 2021
- This video (a) explains liquid democracy, (b) compares it to direct democracy and representative democracy, and (c) articulates the strengths and drawbacks of each system. It discusses liquid democracy as a system to experiment with for social media governance.
0:41 - Liquid Democracy Overview
1:58 - How this relates to social media
4:13 - Direct democracy & drawbacks
7:00 - Representative democracy & drawbacks
9:49 - Liquid democracy strengths
12:05 - Liquid democracy drawbacks
Ooh! I thought I had an orginal idea! I wrote an article about how to improve democracy, and one of the thing was being able to assign your vote to a politician and withdraw it and give it to someone else at any time. I didn't know there was a word for it.
On the "hidden votes pathway" note - I've also seen it explained where individual's votes or who non-delegated individuals delegate are kept secret, but the votes of people who accept a role as delegates are public information. That way seems to make a lot of sense to me - folks concerned about their privacy need not worry, but folks who accept the responsibility of carrying others' votes as delegates sacrifice that level of privacy.
That's a nice adjustment to the model! Although I could see a lot more votes getting "lost" if people can't find someone they trust who is willing to let their votes be public. But it is better then votes disappearing behind the scenes to be passed through multiple hands.
@@thenewenlightenmentwithash8465 to riff a bit more... Alternatively delegates' vote information could be available to their delegators, making the votes of large, influential delegates essentially public information, but if you and you sibling use your grandparent as a proxy, you two would be able to see how they use your vote (and theirs) but the privacy would be usually protected within a small group. Your channel is really cool by the way!
OMG! This is the first time I'm learning about liquid democracy so interesting learn something new everyday.
Just discovered this channel and wow. Love this video, great overview of liquid democracy. Would love to see an overview of Sortition as a potential democratic institution. I like the idea of a multicameral system with different forms of democracy for each house.
Thank you for all this Ashley! Great work
I had thought about that some time ago, but I didn't know that there is an actual conceptual system that formalizes it.
Great video. Good clear explanations and examples. Balanced and objective.
Firstly, nicely covered and well explained video and concept so thank you for that.😊
Secondly, I can't help using my critical mind and point out some weaknesses when it comes to LD idea, at least in the form that you have presented:
1) insofar as the classification of policies is concerned, the reality informs us that these things are not always so clear cut.
For example, I could use or delegate my vote on economic issues.
But economy covers a wide range of topics: agriculture, infrastructure, transport, industry, financial services, etc etc.
Indeed , look at ministries of most countries nowadays: there's about 30-35 of them in each country, and there's quite a big degree of overlap of them!
But... It is not uncommon that sometimes 2-3 ministries have to liaise with each other to make one law reform. What happens if I were to delegate one aspect (ie ministry's competence) to person B but another aspect (ie another ministry's competence) to person C? After all, both of these delegations are within the same vote (or a multiple of votes if delegated to me) that I have.
And if I'm to be deprived of my wish to split my vote in this fashion and must decide on one delegation, then it's not really much use in it, is there?
So like I said:
It is not inconceivable to think of a change in law that would cut across several of these topics.
I may not want to vote on all issues of economic nature or delegate all economic votes to someone.
I may want to vote for one aspect of the reform myself, I may want to delegate to person A in some tiny aspect of the same reform and another aspect of again the same reform to person B.
In other words, there must be options for a further and greater partitioning of the vote in question.
But if there's too much partitioning, the whole system may be too unclear and indeed there can be conflicts as to how the conflicts should be resolved and how votes should be assigned. Hope you get what I mean!
2) suppose I delegate a vote to someone but that somebody uses their right to delegate it further. Do I then have the right to be notified of this change and react accordingly? After all, I may only want to delegate a vote to that one person, but not to the other person who I don't know!
3) the system can lead to logical loops of various nature.
Suppose we have a society of 10 people. Let's say that on some aspect, person 1 delegates a vote to 2, person 2 delegates to 3, 3 to 4, 4 to 5 and so it continues until 10 delegates its vote to 1.
So, we have now created a loop in which case everybody's vote is effectively passing on to someone else but that someone has passed it to the next person and so on.
So in effect all 10 votes keep passing over the whole loop and can never find their eventual recipient. Isn't that correct? So what happens then?
Similarly in a scenario you have described: let's say 50 people delegate a vote to person X, who himself wishes to delegate his vote (now worth 50x the weight of the vote!) to one of the original 50 people that voted for him, perhaps a family member or a good friend. So we've created a loop. What happens then?
Also I have just thought of number 4) just now, so here it is:
There's no doubt that modern facilities (the internet or an app) would have to be utilised for the purpose of voting and self governing in this way.
Because we can't reasonably expect all society to meet in a specific place at the same time and actually vote on things etc.
So it's obvious the technology used would have to be secure enough, reliable enough, transparent enough, error proof, would have to be efficient and resistant to hacking attempts etc. - those may not always be guaranteed in the current world.
So yes, it would need a lot of good programming and a lot of people engaged to have such a tool to be designed in the first place.
Indeed, even nowadays e-voting is a concept in only some countries (Estonia with a population of 1.3 M comes to mind, which is the only such country in Europe I believe!). And it has to be said that e-voting in the current representative democracy system is far less complex than LD voting system would have to be in order to become reliable and useful for everyone. (Referring here to problems 1-3 that I've identified)
This is a great explainer, I'm going to share this with as many people as possible
I've just joined your channel and this is a nice and clear overview. I see liquid democracy as a way to get more technical expertise into politics. With the speed the world is changing these days due to issues like COVID, AI and climate change we need politicians who can understand complex, technical issues, and ideally, even be an expert in the field. So a person you delegate votes to could be that expert. But just like any politician we need to be able to trust that delegate, so no they can't pass on our votes, their voting history needs to be public, the possibility of corruption needs to be looked at by some dedicated journalist. Delegates could even be licensed to ensure that they are real people, with maybe a minimum number of votes before they can get any real power. It could be made to work maybe at the small local level at first, then see how it evolves. Thanks for covering the topic!
Great work !
Have an exam tomorrow. Thanks so much
This is great as usual Ashley. I'd read a tiny bit about this before but you explained it much more clearly. Did you say though whether it's known how many votes a particular individual has had passed on to them? If it is that would obviously open the door to some of the same group dynamics that seem to affect assemblies with public voting - 'cascades,' for example, where people vote more based on what others are doing than what they think themselves. If it's not public how many votes people have had passed onto them, we can imagine some individuals having lots and lots of votes and that not being common knowledge, which might raise some worries about accountability.
In some ways, the devil is in the details with a lot of these systems. I could see systems where the number of votes a person has passed to them is public, other systems where it is unknown to the individual receiving votes, and others where that information is passed along, but is private to the individual (so that they could choose to share publicly, keep it private or even lie). I think there would be advantages & disadvantages to each. The cascade phenomenon seems like a huge problem, actually. I could see time lags being introduced to prevent that. For example, maybe vote counts are made public, but not until right before a particular vote happens (and perhaps after the time when people decide who to allocate their vote to). Still, the existence of the internet might create cascades even with a time lag. Awesome things to think about!
The issues she raised about liqyid democracy are trivial to solve with correct ledger technology implementation.
This sounds like a phenomenal idea, and something we have the technology to accomplish now. It's so apparent that our current institutions are subject to absurd bottlenecks, and I dream of a system where we could choose our ideological alignment so clearly and intentionally. Is there a community or forum with a discourse on the theory/topics your channel outlines?
Maybe one way to approach the long-vote-chain issue is to let individuals decide which issues they're willing to represent others on, and to enforce voting transparency on the specific issue from that point up the chain.
Have you researched “Deliberative Democracy?”
Well laid out and easy to understand for most. Blockchain World see number of attempts to solve the issue of bad actors corrupting the process, one I believe in is well underway is the Eden concept and although more community based could be used also for larger communities and even National Elections. Some of us looking at how particularly the "political playoffs" could be implemented to fit in with own local "normal" elections. Your video worth sharing around and hope you don't mind I did so in LinkeIn already?.
Definitely share the video wherever you see fit! What is the Eden Concept? When I Google it, I get the Eden Alternative and a book on marriage.
@@thenewenlightenmentwithash8465 Whoow, took me a year to check back here. Sorry! Came around as I am collecting good videos for political campaigning in Sweden. Liquid Democracy through Direktdemokraterna (Direct Democrats.
On Eden here is a year old, short but very effective description, of Eden election process. It was the first ever trial and sine then a few more and number of official elections since. Software further develeoped and all recorded on blockchain.
do you have any book recommendations that delve further into liquid democracy?
System Override (by Stallman, Strossen, Siri, Wolfman-Jones) has a chapter on liquid democracy. It's short, but well-written. Otherwise, I don't know of a book with a longer delve into the topic.
I’m a member of a small political party who would love to talk to you about how to start a pilot like this in a city where it’s not enforced but officials know what the people want
I recommend getting in touch with the RadicalXChange community. People there are working on developing tools for liquid democracy and quadratic voting. The tools are not fully developed, as far as I understand. But I'm sure they will need different communities to test out the tools as they develop them.
So, if I assign my healthcare votes to person A and my technology votes to person B, who gets to vote when an issue related to healthcare technology arises? It seems like a lot of overlap can occur. If I get to choose whether person A or B gets to allocate my vote for that blended issue, then you are back to square one about the huge time burden that exists with direct democracy. Also, it seems like an auditing nightmare in terms of accountability; and, as you said, invites corruption and fraud.
Why not just have a direct democracy situation where everyone votes online in a secure environment (like proxy voting in investments) and where they can simply choose not to vote on issues where they lack knowledge or interest?
Hmm I think the prevent the drawback of nontransparent deferment of voting, we can just have it so they can’t transfer votes transferred to them. They may consult outside expertise and maybe we can discuss transparency in terms of sources they used to make the decisions but make it so they are the ones ultimately to make it.
Also a good counterbalance between mob rule and tyrant of the majority is having basic universal rights.
If I put my vote in someone and they put their vote in someone else, I feel like my vote should automactically return back to me.
I can already imagine elites buying votes from people who have a large audience, like influencers, political pundits, doctors, teachers, etc. I also, think the number of active effective votes a person has shoul be private too. For personal safety reasons.
Yep, all good ideas👍
Cover sortition
czcams.com/video/xMDoE6fIAXE/video.html
dad alright kids give me your votes.
this will defiantly make families as single voters on certain issues pretty much.
Yeah, I've thought about this. I could also see abusive boyfriends and overbearing co-workers trying to force votes. Such a system would need ways of handling this. I could see a system where there was an option to indicate that someone was coercing you to give them their vote and to have fake votes allocated to them. But that introduces dishonesty into the system in a way I'm not 100% comfortable with. Another way might be to keep a person's vote count hidden from them, so that nobody knew how many votes had been allocated to them.
Artificial Intelligence offers a solution to all of the shortcomings of direct and liquid democracy
I think there is a lot of hope in that, and I see it, too. But tell me more.
Миру нужно прямое народовластие! Через блокчейн! Представительская демократия-это постоянный обман!
registered voters should be able to simply vote with their smartphone app.