Scorecard: Liquid Democracy
This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.
This is a scorecard for Liquid Democracy. Scorecards are a shorthand summation of the arguments for and against. Scores out of 5. Arrows compare to Presidential Democracy.
% of citizens who have a representative they prefer: ↑↑↑5/51
Representatives accountable to the people: ↑↑4/52
Bundled Governance: No Change3
Justifiable Governance: No Change
Independence of Evaluation: No Change
Effectiveness of Governance: No Change (low confidence)5
Legitimacy of Governance: ↑4/56
Self-governance: ↑↑5/57
This is the fundamental guarantee of Liquid Democracy in theory: that every candidate who stands for office is elected and represents the people who chose them. Representatives will have more or less voting weight in the legislature based on their number of backers, but as a citizen, you are guaranteed a representative of your choice. Some implementation constraints may force you to have your second choice in a Ranked Choice Voting version of Liquid Democracy, but there are no or nearly no people whose vote goes to someone who ends up losing.
Current electoral accountability is that you can choose the opponent in the next election. In practice, however, the opponent is often worse, especially in single party districts where no serious challenger will take on the incumbent in the primary. In Liquid Democracy, you could in theory allow people to move their vote at any time, and there will be a broader availability of representatives to choose from.
Depends on the system, but I am assuming you get to choose a single representative, and so the problems of bundling continue unabated. Since we pick many representatives, this isn’t a 1.
Slightly weirdly, I’m saying that a better score here equals less dilution. Liquid Democracy likely increases the number of representatives, and reduces dilution, simply because at a minimum, both candidates in any current 2-party race will become representatives, and potentially many more than that will.
This is actually very unclear. Maybe Liquid Democracy would be more effective? But there’s little case for Liquid Democracy having any incentive structure or systemic force which drives greater effectiveness, so I’m calling this No Change.
Liquid Democracy seems pretty legitimate - a guaranteed right to a representative to argue and vote for you in Congress! But at the same time, even people whose side won in the last elections don’t always feel like our government is legitimately looking out for our interests, so Liquid Democracy may not be enough to get to 5/5.
This could easily be a 4, if there is enough gatekeeping around who can be a representative that we still feel like the people who get chosen are a class apart from us, the citizenry.