Information aggregation with delegation of votes

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how liquid democracy can improve or worsen information aggregation depending on voter preferences and information accuracy, highlighting conditions for efficient equilibria.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of liquid democracy's equilibria, showing when it outperforms direct and representative democracy in information aggregation.

Findings

Liquid democracy can improve welfare and information aggregation in certain equilibria.

It also admits equilibria that perform worse than traditional systems.

Conditions for easier coordination on efficient equilibria are identified.

Abstract

Liquid democracy is a system that combines aspects of direct democracy and representative democracy by allowing voters to either vote directly themselves, or delegate their votes to others. In this paper we study the information aggregation properties of liquid democracy in a setting with heterogeneously informed truth-seeking voters -- who want the election outcome to match an underlying state of the world -- and partisan voters. We establish that liquid democracy admits equilibria which improve welfare and information aggregation over direct and representative democracy when voters' preferences and information precisions are publicly or privately known. Liquid democracy also admits equilibria which do worse than the other two systems. We discuss features of efficient and inefficient equilibria and provide conditions under which voters can more easily coordinate on the efficient equilibria in liquid democracy than the other two systems.