Fluid democracy is a voting paradigm that allows voters to choose between directly voting and transitively delegating their votes to other voters. While fluid democracy has been viewed as a system that can combine the best aspects of direct and representative democracy, it can also result in situations where few voters amass a large amount of influence. To analyze the impact of this shortcoming, we consider what has been called an epistemic setting, where voters decide on a binary issue for which there is a ground truth. Previous work has shown that under certain assumptions on the delegation mechanism, the concentration of power is so severe that fluid democracy is less likely to identify the ground truth than direct voting. We examine different, arguably more realistic, classes of mechanisms, and prove they behave well by ensuring that (with high probability) there is a limit on concentration of power. Our proofs demonstrate that delegations can be treated as stochastic processes and that they can be compared to well-known processes from the literature -- such as preferential attachment and multi-types branching process -- that are sufficiently bounded for our purposes. Our results suggest that the concerns raised about fluid democracy can be overcome, thereby bolstering the case for this emerging paradigm.

中文翻译：

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捍卫流动民主

流动民主是一种投票范式，它允许选民在直接投票和将他们的选票传递给其他选民之间进行选择。虽然流动民主被视为可以结合直接民主和代议制民主的最佳方面的制度，但它也可能导致少数选民积累大量影响力的情况。为了分析这个缺点的影响，我们考虑所谓的认知设置，在这种设置中，选民决定一个有基本事实的二元问题。先前的工作表明，在对授权机制的某些假设下，权力集中非常严重，以至于与直接投票相比，流动民主不太可能确定基本事实。我们研究了不同的，可以说是更现实的机制类别，并通过确保（很有可能）限制权力集中来证明他们表现良好。我们的证明表明，委托可以被视为随机过程，并且可以将它们与文献中众所周知的过程进行比较——例如优先连接和多类型分支过程——对于我们的目的来说是足够有界的。我们的研究结果表明，可以克服对流动民主提出的担忧，从而支持这种新兴范式。