Liquid democracy: two experiments on delegation in voting
Although I&#x27;m all for exploring different avenues of democratic decision making and liquid democracy is definitely something I&#x27;m interested in and so this article is really valuable information; for a while now I&#x27;ve been much more interested in forms of participation that require <i>more</i> from it&#x27;s participants and not less.<p>I think for this reason I&#x27;m much more interested in the experiments done with citizens assemblies and minipublics. They seem to be much more better suited for combating misinformation as well as most of the perverse incentives of traditional politics, the latter being problems that wouldn&#x27;t go away with delegation as I would imagine most people would end up delegating because it&#x27;s so similar to our current form of participation which is representative voting.<p>To me, one of the biggest issues right now in politics is that politicians have pretty much stopped trying to build a country together as much just trying to keep things going in ways that don&#x27;t affect them too much. As in, people from both parties have very similar interests: keep themselves in power. This doesn&#x27;t seem to lead to good decisions being made, but when you have referendums that is top down direct democracy it seems to be, now a days, a process that can be very easily manipulated to spread misinformation. We can look at the Colombian referendum for peace, brexit and the recent Chilean referendum for a new constitution.<p>With this in mind, it seems to me like we need designs that are a bit more complex and I do think citizens assemblies fit the bill. I encourage anyone that&#x27;s interested to take a look at Helene Landemore&#x27;s Open Democracy.