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Interactive Democracy Blue Sky Ideas Track Session 29: Blue Sky AAMAS 2018, July 10-15, 2018, Stockholm, Sweden Interactive Democracy Blue Sky Ideas Track Markus Brill TU Berlin Berlin, Germany [email protected] ABSTRACT approached this question by developing an app, DemocracyOS [48], Interactive Democracy is an umbrella term that encompasses a va- that allows users to propose, debate, and vote on issues. Democ- riety of approaches to make collective decision making processes racyOS is only one example of a quickly growing number of ap- more engaging and responsive. A common goal of these approaches proaches that aim to reconcile established democratic processes is to utilize modern information technology—in particular, the with the desire of citizens to participate in political decision mak- 1 Internet—in order to enable more interactive decision making pro- ing. Another example is the software LiquidFeedback [6], which is 2 cesses. An integral part of many interactive democracy proposals developed by the Association for Interactive Democracy. Currently, are online decision platforms that provide much more flexibility these tools are mainly used for decision making within progressive and interaction possibilities than traditional democratic systems. political parties [9, p. 162] or in the context of community engage- This is achieved by embracing the novel paradigm of delegative ment platforms such as WeGovNow [10]. A common goal of these voting, often referred to as liquid democracy, which aims to recon- approaches, often summarized under the umbrella term Interac- 3 cile the idealistic appeal of direct democracy with the practicality tive Democracy (henceforth ID), is to utilize modern information of representative democracy. The successful design of interactive technology—in particular, the Internet—in order to enable more democracy systems presents a multidisciplinary research challenge; interactive decision making processes. one important aspect concerns the elicitation and aggregation of When designing a platform for interactive collective decision preferences. However, existing proposals are mostly disconnected making, there are lots of design decisions to be made, regarding, for from the vast body of scientific literature on preference aggregation example, issue selection (which issues are considered?), option gen- and related topics. In this article, I argue that tools and techniques eration (which options are on the ballot?), interaction opportunities developed in the multiagent systems literature should be employed (how is deliberation and delegation organized?), ballot structure (in to aid the design of online decision platforms and other interactive which format can participants express their preferences?), and ag- democracy systems. Insights from computational social choice, an gregation methods (which method is used to tally the votes?). There emerging research area at the intersection of computer science and is no shortage of concrete suggestions of how ID platforms could economics, will be particularly relevant for this endeavor. be implemented (see the blog post by Ford [34] for an overview). Most of these suggestions, however, are rather ad hoc in nature KEYWORDS and little attention is devoted to a principled comparison and eval- uation of methods. This increases the risk of employing methods preference aggregation; group decision making; liquid democracy; with unintended flaws. e-democracy; preference handling; computational social choice; In this article, I argue that concepts and techniques from the algorithmic decision theory; delegative voting; proportional repre- multiagent systems literature—particularly those dealing with pref- sentation; crowdsourcing; participatory budgeting erences and their aggregation—should be employed to aid the design ACM Reference Format: of online decision platforms and other ID tools. Computational so- Markus Brill. 2018. Interactive Democracy. In Proc. of the 17th International cial choice (COMSOC), an interdisciplinary subfield at the intersec- Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2018), tion of economics and computer science, seems to be particularly Stockholm, Sweden, July 10–15, 2018, IFAAMAS, 5 pages. relevant in this endeavor.4 Even though research in COMSOC has made tremendous progress in recent years [15, 31], the practical im- 1 INTRODUCTION pact of the field has remained rather limited.5 This is partly due to In her 2014 TED talk How to upgrade democracy for the Internet era, the fact that many of the rather sophisticated preference handling Pia Mancini poignantly states that “we are 21st-century citizens, and preference aggregation mechanisms that are routinely studied doing our very, very best to interact with 19th century-designed 1DemocracyOS has since been superseded by Sovereign, developed by the Democracy institutions that are based on an information technology of the 15th Earth Foundation (http://www.democracy.earth). century” [47]. Mancini goes on to observe that the way democratic 2http://www.interaktive-demokratie.org/index.en.html 3 societies make collective decisions is highly outdated. This leads The field is lacking a unified terminology. For example, Interactive Democracy is sometimes referred to as iDemocracy [18] or participatory democracy [2]. The terms to the question: “If Internet is the new printing press, then what liquid democracy and delegative democracy usually refer to the paradigm of delegative is democracy for the Internet era?” Mancini and her collaborators voting (see Section 2). And terms like e-democracy [60], digital democracy [41], and Internet democracy [49] emphasize the role of information technology. Proc. of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 4Strongly related and equally relevant fields are algorithmic decision theory and pref- (AAMAS 2018), M. Dastani, G. Sukthankar, E. André, S. Koenig (eds.), July 10–15, 2018, erence handling [13, 26]. The focus on COMSOC in the current article is due to the Stockholm, Sweden. © 2018 International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and author’s background and should not be interpreted as a claim to superior relevance. Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved. 5Notable exceptions are websites like Spliddit [37] and RoboVote (http://robovote.org). 1183 Session 29: Blue Sky AAMAS 2018, July 10-15, 2018, Stockholm, Sweden in the COMSOC literature, though superior in theory, are rarely 1 used in practice. In this article, I argue that the novel application area of interactive democracy has the potential to change that. Voter 1 Voter 2 In the following, I provide examples of challenges that are en- 1 countered when building ID systems, together with pointers to 2 3 2 tools and techniques from the COMSOC literature that could be employed to tackle these challenges. Section 2 focusses on issues related to the paradigm of delegative voting (aka liquid democracy), Voter 3 Voter 4 Voter 5 and Section 3 describes other challenges. Section 4 concludes. 2 DELEGATIVE VOTING Figure 1: Illustration of a voting situation using ranked del- Participants of online decision platforms can often choose whether egations. Labels of outgoing edges from a node correspond they want to vote directly on a particular issue or whether they to ranks in the delegation list of the respective voter. want to delegate their vote to somebody they trust. Delegations can be specified either on an issue-by-issue basis, for whole topic areas, or even globally. Crucially, delegations are transitive and see Figure 1 for an illustration. Using the first (most preferred) del- decisions whether to vote directly, to delegate, or to abstain can be egation in each ranked list results in a delegation cycle involving changed at any time.6 This paradigm of delegative voting, which is voters 1 and 2. Therefore, we have to “go down” in at least one of often referred to as liquid democracy, aims to reconcile the idealistic the lists. Taking the second option in voter 1’s list would result in appeal of direct democracy (where every voter votes directly on both voters 1 and 2 (by transitivity) delegating to voter 3. On the every issue) with the practicality of representative democracy (where other hand, taking the second option in voter 2’s list would result voters vote for delegates, who then vote on the voters’ behalf on in both voters 1 and 2 delegating to voter 5. A priori, no solution all issues) by giving voters the opportunity to have their say on all seems preferable to the other one, suggesting perhaps that one issues, but not requiring them to get informed on each issue.7 delegation should go to voter 3 and the other one to voter 5. The Delegative voting gives rise to several novel questions in voting situation gets more complicated if we consider the possibility that theory. For instance, in order to successfully implement a delegative voters abstain. For example, if voter 3 (the second most preferred voting infrastructure, one has to think about potential problems delegate of voter 1) abstains, should voter 1’s delegation then go to such as voter 4 (the third most preferred delegate of voter 1) or to voter 5 (the second most preferred delegate of voter 2, who is the most (1) delegation cycles (voter 1 delegates her vote to voter 2, who preferred delegate of voter 1)? delegates to voter 3, who delegates back to voter 1), One possibility to resolve situations like the one just described (2) abstentions (what if one delegates to somebody who abstains consists in employing a Markov chain approach. Let ϵ 2 (0; 1) and from voting?), and consider a random walk on the delegation graph (e.g., the graph (3) inconsistent outcomes (what if different delegations for differ- in Figure 1) that starts at some fixed delegating voter and follows ent issues lead to a globally incompatible set of decisions?). delegation edges as follows: With probability proportional to 1, go The remainder of this section contains approaches to tackle to the most preferred delegate of the current voter; with probability these problems, and a discussion of strategic considerations that proportional to ϵ, go to the second most preferred delegate; with 2 delegative voting gives rise to.
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