Workshop on Liquid Democracy

Liquid democracy bridges representative democracy and direct democracy, allowing agents to either vote directly on issues or choose a voter who will vote on their behalf. As delegations are transitive, someone who received delegations is free to vote directly or delegate their votes further. Liquid democracy has gained a lot of interest in recent years with political parties and voting platforms advocating for it. However, as it is unclear in what way liquid democracy should be implemented, this has opened up a wide range of research areas.

Furthermore, due to the added complexity of liquid democracy over standard voting procedures, it is clear that the advancements in technology will play a large part in the implementation of liquid democracy. However, this also raises questions about how we can effectively use technology without harming democracy.

This workshop aims at providing a venue for in-depth discussions on the topic of liquid democracy and its current research directions.

Details

It will be held between 10:00 and 16:00 (UTC+01, Toulouse time) via zoom. The zoom link to the workshop will be sent by email to registered participants. Complete the following form to register.

Program

Title and abstracts can be found here. The slides of the talks can be downloaded by clicking on the titles.

• 9:45 Welcome and introduction by local organisers
• 10:00 Davide Grossi– University of Groningen and University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
  Power in Liquid Democracy
• 10:30 Grammateia Kotsialou – London School of Economics, UK
  Incentivising Participation in Liquid Democracy with Breadth-First Delegation
• 11:00 Hugo Gilbert – Université Paris Dauphine, France
  Delegation Games in Liquid Democracy with Restricted Preferences
• 11:30 Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin – TU Berlin, Germany
  Liquid Democracy with Ranked Delegations
• —break
• 14:00 Lirong Xia– Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
  Representative Proxy Voting
• 14:30 Palash Dey – Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India
  On Parameterized Complexity of Liquid Democracy
• 14:30 Nimrod Talmon – Ben-Gurion University, Israel
  Fine-grained Liquid Democracy
• 15:00 Discussion

Organisation

This workshop is organised by Rachael Colley and Umberto Grandi as part of ANR-18-CE23-0009 project SCONE.