[MG] Liquid democracy versus proxy voting

[Jens Egholm]

Thanks for your reply Alexander.

> I don't know, but for me, what you describe as proxy voting is also what
> liquid democracy means.

I'm just curious as to where this definition comes from. I haven't
been able to find any articles/papers about this.

> I've never heard of the concept which you describe as "liquid democracy"
> which
> Associates a parliament with a fixed amount of representatives to it. But if
> you don't have a fixed amount of representatives associated with a
> parliament.... you could define parliament as all representatives, that is
> all people who vote, some represent only themselves, some represent
> themselves plus others...
>
> If you use the latter definition of parliament, it will become what you
> described as proxy voting.

My original idea was to couple Habermas' ideas about the public sphere
(deliberation) with the internet concept mass-to-mass communication
(term from Bohman 2010). I found that proxy-voting could do exactly
this; create small "minipublics" (again, see Bohman 2010) where active
deliberation would do exactly this. So I turned to the legislature;
It's very idealistic to completely remove the parliament and rely on
proxies as such. That's where the concept I (wrongly it seems)
referred to as "liquid democracy" comes in. This would essentially
allow the political structure to persist, but would still include
strong elements of e-democracy. As mentioned I discussed this with
Michael Allan who proposed the term "liquid legislature". It actually
sounds much more appealing to me now...

Best regards,
Jens Egholm



Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org