Transitive proxy voting (or ‘liquid democracy’) is a novel form of collective decision making, often framed as an attractive hybrid of direct and representative democracy. Although the ideas behind liquid democracy have garnered widespread support, there have been relatively few attempts to model it formally. This paper makes three main contributions. First, it proposes a new social choice-theoretic model of liquid democracy, which is distinguished by taking a richer formal perspective on the process by which a voter chooses a proxy. Second, it examines the model from an axiomatic perspective, proving (a) a proxy vote analogue of May’s Theorem and (b) an impossibility result concerning monotonicity properties in a proxy vote setting. Third, it explores the topic of manipulation in transitive proxy votes. Two forms of manipulation specific to the proxy vote setting are defined, and it is shown that manipulation occurs in strictly more cases in proxy votes than in classical votes.

传递代理投票（或“流动民主”）是一种新颖的集体决策形式，通常被认为是直接民主和代议制民主的有吸引力的混合体。尽管流动民主背后的想法得到了广泛的支持，但对其进行正式建模的尝试却相对较少。本文做出了三个主要贡献。首先，它提出了一种新的流动民主的社会选择理论模型，其特点是对选民选择代理人的过程采取了更丰富的正式视角。其次，它从公理的角度检查模型，证明 (a) May 定理的代理投票模拟和 (b) 代理投票设置中关于单调性属性的不可能结果。第三，它探讨了传递代理投票中的操纵主题。