The political parties in Vallentuna’s Local Parliament refused to cooperate with Demoex. Then it became impossible to carry through the experiment as intended. We would like to examine Delegated Voting, aka. Liquid Democracy. Delegated Voting is a flexible form of democracy in between direkt- and representative.
The lack of participation from the other parties made Delegated Voting inappropriate for us to use. We tried the first years, but then we aborted the delegated voting because the advisors were too few. The number of voters increased (counting even the passive voters) but the number of persons controlling Demoex policy decreased.
I myself became dominant, being advisor for more than 40% of the online voters. Maybe I should be flattered, but I was not comfortable in this role. I did not want to gain my own influence, rather to make a counter-example to the Iron law of Oligachy by avoiding the hierarchical structure that political organizations suffers from. The use of Delegated Voting made Demoex more hierarchical and thereby easier to manipulate.
A failure or success? 
January 31, 2011 at 10:46 am |
>pn: …gain my own influence… counter-example to the Iron law of Oligachy…
-M: But if you have more power, then don’t you have more power to counter corruption?
>pn: …hierarchical structure… Delegated Voting made Demoex more hierarchical and thereby easier to manipulate.
-M: Manipulate in what way? Can’t it be manipulated in favor of progress and benevolence? If so, then this seems advantageous.
January 31, 2011 at 2:30 pm |
Hi Mark,
Tricky questions… There are better and worse leaders, of course!
If there was a vaccination against power abuse, I would like to take it and become an enlightened leader (I think we all would). But the only “vaccination” against power abuse I know is transparency, democracy and decentralization.
February 1, 2011 at 2:28 am |
>pn: … abuse I know is transparency, democracy and decentralization.
-M: I will respectfully suggest another… competition (which is related to transparency and democracy).
The idea here is to place potentially corrupt leadership in competition with immediately identifiable competitors. With my system, the leader could be replaced overnight if his/her transitive proxy rank fell below that of his/her top competitor – mine is a real-time system with no voting cycles.
I once called it Structural Deep Democracy, SD2. I now call it Transitive Mandatory Double Proxy – TMDP.
Its still a bit too advanced for political elections, and I am more comfortable with Single Transferable Vote for elections, but I would like to see TMDP used to organize Registered Lobbies, the political community surrounding elected officials.
Gud Velsigne,
Mark, Seattle WA USA
February 1, 2011 at 5:00 pm |
Your idea sounds interesting, Mark. The shift to a more direct democracy will be gradual and we need to examine ways of combining direct and representative democracy. I wuold like to put the question this way: How can we maximize the influence of citizens while we have elected representatives?
February 1, 2011 at 11:06 pm |
>pn: …influence of citizens while we have elected representatives…
It would be in the interest of elected officials to organize a Registered Lobby because it would give them the appearance of being ‘cutting edge’ and ‘for the people’.
TMDP is an umbrella system, and more complex variants can be built on it. I propose a ‘generalist default’ variant. People would maintain a pick of their favorite generalists in a database.
If an issue came up where the voter did not know of any specialists for the task/issue, the transitive proxy votes (TPVs) would go to the generalists, where they could transfer the TPVs to specialists.
In other Liquid Democracy systems, I see people given the choice between Direct Democracy(DD) *OR* Representative Democracy(RD).
My system is unique in which RD is always the option for an issue:
1. A voter chooses generalists only.
2. A voter chooses generalists and specialists.
3. A voter chooses generalists and a direct vote.
4. A voter chooses generalists, specialists and a direct vote.
This way expert opinion is always present by which to compare with the popular opinion, and when they vote alike, everybody is happy.
When the vote is split, then there is deliberation. Experts try to convince the commoners, and if the commoners are still dissatisfied, they have the option to choose new generalists/specialists (experts).
All of this could be implemented on a Content Management System (CMS). I was thinking of a Python language based CMS like DjangoCMS.
February 2, 2011 at 3:04 am |
I just added “Proxy voting” to the “Voting systems” section of Wikipedia, so there are links to Demoex.