Deliberative Democracy with Dilutive Voting Power Sharing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model of deliberative democracy where individuals iteratively form expert committees with shared voting power, leading to a finite convergence process for updating proposals.

Contribution

It presents a novel iterative model of deliberation with dilutive voting power sharing and proves finite convergence of the process.

Findings

The process converges in finite time.

Voting power diminishes with each iteration.

Committee formation depends on accumulated voting power.

Abstract

We present a deliberation model where a group of individuals with heterogeneous preferences iteratively forms expert committees whose members are tasked with the updating of an exogenously given status quo change proposal. Every individual holds some initial voting power that is represented by a finite amount of indivisible units with some underlying value. Iterations happen in three stages. In the first stage, everyone decides which units to keep for themselves and where to distribute the rest. With every ownership mutation, a unit's underlying value diminishes by some exogenously given amount. In the second stage, the deliberative committee is formed by the individuals with the most accumulated voting power. These experts can author corrections to the proposal which are proportional to their accumulated power. In the third stage, if an individual outside of the committee disagrees with a correction, she can vote against it with their remaining voting power. A correction is discarded if more than half of the total voting power outside of the committee is against it. If either the committee or the proposal remain unchanged for two consecutive iterations, the process stops. We show that this will happen in finite time.