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This article provides an in-depth survey of political representation in Liquid Democracy (LD). More precisely, it refutes two potential criticisms: 1) LD impoverishes the concept of political representation relative to existing representative democracies; 2) LD undermines the centrality of political parties. In answer to (1), the article shows that LD is compatible with a selection model of representation, in which proxies are characterized as gyroscopic representatives, driven by intrinsic motivation and indifferent to sanctions. This claim has far-reaching normative implications for the mandate-independence tradeoff, anti-elitism, and deliberation under LD. With regard to (2), the article examines the function of parties, arguing that, although it puts parties and interest groups on a level playing field, LD does not threaten partisanship, but rather expands the range of potential carriers of partisanship. In addressing these objections, this article demonstrates the democratic credentials of LD, showing that LD is compatible with a high-quality, democratic understanding of representation, which is surrounded by a cluster of thick concepts like commitment, intrinsic motivation, alignment of objectives, sympathy, trust, and dialogue. This turns LD into a powerful instrument for the refurbishment of representation both as a unique mode of political participation and as a practice of self-government.

Liquid democracy is a proxy voting method where proxies are delegable. We propose and study a game-theoretic model of liquid democracy to address the following question: when is it rational for a voter to delegate her vote? We study the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibria in this model, and how group accuracy is affected by them. We complement these theoretical results by means of agent-based simulations to study the effects of delegations on group's accuracy on variously structured social networks.

The paper suggests the general analysis of the so called liquid democracy – the newest political concept which combines the elements of direct (deliberative) and representative democracy forms, by means of the modern information-network technology (based on internet). Brief historical review of the world democratic developments emphasizes the continuity of democratic forms from ancient to present times in all parts of Europe, including Russia. The modern liquid democracy theory is analyzed concerning both its strengths and weaknesses. As far as it unites direct and representative democracy concepts, it contains the advantages of both, but at the same time, multiple theoretical and practical problems need to be solved, many technical solutions are to be found to make the concept work. The main question raised in the article is: should this new concept be regarded as a real practical solution to improve the present-day state of world democracy, or is it just another utopian idea?

Politische und gesellschaftliche Polarisierung ist ein interessantes Phänomen, über dessen Auswirkungen viele unterschiedliche, zum Teil auch gegensätzliche, Theorien existieren. Polarisierung wird in der Literatur mit unterschiedlichen Methoden gemessen. Die vorliegende Arbeit gibt einen Überblick über existierende Polarisierungsmaße und es werden zwei neuartige Maße aus dem Gebiet der spektralen Graphentheorie vorgestellt. Anschließend werden die bekannten und die neu entwickelten Maße auf den LiquidFeedback-Datensatz der Piratenpartei Deutschland angewandt. Als Ergebnis lässt sich festhalten, dass die Maße teilweise zu unterschiedlichen Ergebnisse kommen. Dies liegt darin begründet, dass nicht alle Maße das Gleiche messen. Um zu verstehen was die einzelnen Maße aussagen, werden wesentliche Eigenschaften von Polarisierungsmaßen herausgearbeitet und es wird für jedes Maß dargelegt, welche Eigenschaften es erfüllt. Die angesprochenen Polarisierungsmaße beziehen sich auf die Entwicklung der Polarisierung zwischen Usern des LiquidFeedback-Systems. Bei der Betrachtung von einzelnen Personen und Abstimmungen fiel unter anderem auf, dass polarisierende Personen mehr Macht durch Delegationen besitzen als die restlichen Personen und dass polarisierte Vorschläge circa doppelt so häufig umgesetzt werden.

The Pirate Party's 2009 election success has clearly demonstrated the increased importance of the internet as a communication space and forum for participation and collaboration. The buzzword Liquid Democracy connotes hopes for more political participation. In her contribution, Anja Adler moves away from the focus on the Pirate Party and looks at Liquid Democracy as a concept of democracy theory, as (political) participation software and as concrete application. In this, she compares the two software solutions Adhocracy and Liquid Feedback and examines possible links between Liquid Democracy and social media. From the perspective of party and participation research, she then analyses possibilities and limits of technology-based participation forms and concludes that despite all challenges, Liquid Democracy, understood as social software, has the potential of enhancing parties' political communication internally as well as externally. Adapted from the source document

Der einführende Teil beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, durch welche gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen und Bedürfnisse die Entstehung von Liquid Democracy als Demokratietheorie stattfinden konnte. Dafür werden überblicksartig einige Problemfelder der repräsentativen Demokratie und der gleichzeitig wachsenden Forderung nach mehr direkter, politischer Beteiligung im Zusammenhang mit der Rolle, die den sozialen Medien dabei zugeschrieben wird, aufgegriffen. Dass dieser Entwicklung zumindest begrifflich demokratiepolitisch Rechnung getragen wurde, wird anhand der Definitionen zu E-Democracy aufgezeigt.Im zweiten Teil werden ein kurzer Überblick über die Liquid-Democracy-Theorie sowie eine Definition dieses Begriffs gegeben. Der Schwerpunkt wird auf den dritten Abschnitt dieser Arbeit gelegt: Hier werden die Softwaresysteme Adhocray und LiquidFeedback, deren Entwickler und Organisationen mit einigen Projekten vorgestellt. ; The question how social changes and needs affect the development of Liquid Democracy as a democratic theory, are discussed in this thesis. Problem areas of representative democracy and the growing demand for more direct, political participation in the context of increasing use of social media, are highlighted. The growing importance is exemplified by the.popularisation of the term E-Democracy.In the second part a brief overview of the Liquid Democracy theory and a definition of the concept are given. To answer the question how Liquid Democracy theory plays out in practice, use cases of the software systems Adhocray and LiquidFeedback are evaluated and used to discuss their potential for fostering more democratic engagement. ; von Christiane Murer ; Abweichender Titel laut Übersetzung der Verfasserin/des Verfassers ; Graz, Univ., Dipl.-Arb., 2014 ; (VLID)251969

The existing (election) voting systems, e.g., representative democracy, have many limitations and often fail to serve the best interest of the people in collective decision making. To address this issue, the concept of liquid democracy has been emerging as an alternative decision-making model to make better use of "the wisdom of crowds". Very recently, a few liquid democracy implementations, e.g. Google Votes and Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), are released; however, those systems only focus on the functionality aspect, as no privacy/anonymity is considered. In this work, we, for the first time, provide a rigorous study of liquid democracy under the Universal Composability (UC) frame- work. In the literature, liquid democracy was achieved via two separate stages -- delegation and voting. We propose an efficient liquid democracy e-voting scheme that uni es these two stages. At the core of our design is a new voting concept called statement voting, which can be viewed as a natural extension of the conventional voting approaches. We remark that our statement voting can be extended to enable more complex voting and generic ledger-based non-interactive multi-party computation. We believe that the statement voting concept opens a door for constructing a new class of e-voting schemes.

Wie erkennen wir Neues in der Politik, und wie bewerten wir dieses Neue, wenn es darauf abzielt, die vertrauten politischen Maßstäbe und -einheiten in Frage zu stellen? Die Piratenpartei als neueste Erscheinung in der bundesrepublikanischen Politik erlaubt es, diesem Problem nicht nur abstrakt nachzugehen. Meine Ausgangshypothese verortet das Neue weder im von der Piratenpartei eingebrachten Thema, noch in einer besonderen Position, die sie innerhalb des politischen Spektrums bezieht, sondern in ihrem Vorschlag, die Art und Weise zu verändern, wie politische Macht in der deutschen Demokratie ausgeübt wird: den Modus demokratischer Herrschaft von Repräsentation auf liquid democracy umzustellen. .

The rapid development of information and communication technologies and the permanent task of improving modern democracy have prompted the modern world public to search for ways, forms and mechanisms for attracting Internet technologies to solve problems of improving the modern democratization process. A critical analysis of the shortcomings of classical forms of democracy, namely direct democracy and representative democracy, has accumulated attempts by the creative Internet-community to search for new conceptual solutions of the perennial question of improving the democratic mechanism for the most complete consideration of the proposals, interests and opinions of each citizen when solving socially important problems both at the local and regional levels, as well as at the national level. The article presents a new concept of democracy by B. Ford. As conceived by its author and his followers, this concept is able to accommodate all the positive aspects and overcome all the shortcomings inherent in the classical forms of democracy. An important aspect of the presentation of this concept in the Ukrainian and Russian language discourse was the analysis of the terminological diversity that defines this phenomenon in modern scientific literature — flexible, moving, transparent, fluid, smooth, negotiable, liquid, fleeting, unstable, delegative, cloudy, self-organizing democracy etc., as well as the search for the most informative, given the social context, terminological definition of this concept in the Ukrainian and Russian language sociological scientific environment. The article analyzes the differences between the new form of democracy proposed by B. Ford and previously known delegative democracy. The need for such an analysis was due to fact, that in his early works B. Ford designated liquid democracy precisely as delegative, which entailed a certain scientific and terminological confusion in scientific discourse. The article discusses the features of a new form of democracy that are associated with the possibilities of using modern information and communication technologies and make liquid democracy an attractive element of the democratization process. The article also defines democratization potential of information and communication technologies.