Liquid democracy
[4] Voters may select representatives they feel are more equipped to adjudicate in unfamiliar fields due to elevated expertise, personal experience, or another indicator of competence.
In 1884, Charles Dodgson (more commonly referred to by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll), the author of the novel Alice in Wonderland, first envisioned the notion of transitive or "liquid" voting in his pamphlet The Principles of Parliamentary Representation.
[11] A few decades later, around 1967, Gordon Tullock suggested that voters could choose their representatives or vote themselves in parliament "by wire", while debates were broadcast on television.
James C. Miller favored the idea that everybody should have the possibility to vote on any question themselves or to appoint a representative who could transmit their inquiries.
[12] In the 21st century, based on the work of Jabbusch and James Green-Armytage,[13] technological innovation has made liquid democracy more feasible to implement.
The first online liquid democracy applications originated in Berlin, Germany following political disillusionment and the emergence of hacker culture.
Representative democracy is seen as a form of governance whereby a single winner is determined for a predefined jurisdiction, with a change of delegation only occurring after the preset term length.
In this way, voters are enabled to effectively choose the most appropriate or competent topic-specific representatives and members of a community or electorate, in real-time, can shape the well-being of their commons, by excluding undesired decision-makers and promoting the desired ones.
Regarding objective-technological elements among liquid democracy software examples, it is reasonable to determine that they originally were not developed with an intention to replace the current and firmly established processes of decision-making in political parties or local governments.
Based on academic research, it is significantly rather the case that liquid democracy software possesses the intrinsic function to contribute additional and alternative value to the processes of traditional elections, channels of communication and discussion, or public consultation.
[20] Their ongoing vulnerability to other, less democratic city states, cumulating in their resounding defeat in the Peloponnesian war, may be explained along such lines.
Liquid democracy may naturally evolve into a type of meritocracy with decisions being delegated to those with knowledge on or personal experience of a specific subject.
[5] Nonetheless, in the admittedly few issues where there exists a clear "ground truth" or "correct answer", Caragiannis and Micha concluded a subset of supposedly more informed voters within a larger populace would be less adept at identifying the ground truth than if every voter had voted directly or if all votes had been delegated to one supreme dictator.
[22] Bryan Ford explains that some of the current challenges to liquid democracy include the unintended concentration of delegated votes due to large numbers of people participating in platforms and decision making; building more secure and decentralized implementation of online platforms in order to avoid unscrupulous administrators or hackers; shortening the thresholds between voter privacy; and delegate accountability.
[5] Rather than empowering the general public, liquid democracy could concentrate power into the hands of a socially prominent, politically strategic, and wealthy few.
In some developed countries, the same is true; in the United States, for example, as of 2021, 85% of American adults own a smartphone resulting in 15% of citizens without access.
[2] Pirate Parties in Germany,[27] Italy, Austria, Norway, France and the Netherlands[28] use liquid democracy with the open-source software LiquidFeedback.
Democracia en Red is a group of Latin Americans who seek a redistribution of political power and a more inclusive discussion.
[32] They created Democracy OS, a platform which allows internet users to propose, debate and vote on different topics.
[35] It created a council of representatives based on a continuous vote of confidence from participants, similar to modern parliaments.
[35] The district of Friesland in Germany has implemented some usage of a platform called LiquidFriesland, but it has not succeeded in radically changing the mode of governance there.
No regulation was planned to be initially adapted to allow local politicians to conduct the process of legal drafting on the LiquidFriesland platform.
