Representation in liquid democracy

Liquid democracy is one of the latest additions to the family of democratic innovations. It is defined here as a collective decision-making or voting system characterized by the principles of voluntary delegation and proxy representation. Under a liquid voting scheme, citizens can choose to either cast a ballot on any given public policy issue, or to pass on the vote to a so-called proxy. This means that, for every collective decision at stake, a portion of the citizenry ranging anywhere from zero to one may cast ballots directly, with the rest being represented by proxies. Liquid democracy therefore oscillates between a fully representative and a fully direct democratic endpoint. Although scholars agree with this broad characterization of liquid democracy as a mixture of direct and representative democracy, a significant portion of the existing literature, most notably in the computational social sciences, tends to emphasize the directness involved in liquid democracy. In contrast to this focus, the present manuscript investigates the other, representative side of liquid voting from the perspective of normative democratic theory. More specifically, the manuscript discusses how a liquid conception of democracy accentuates a range of ideas and values closely related to political representation, but which existing theories of election-based democracy fail to capture. These include a selection-based model of representation, the proportionality representation principle, a non-elitist understanding of representation (which can at once include experts along with amateurs, full-time as well as part-time politicians), a more pluralist understanding of partisanship, a fragmentation of the political party system, a more personalized or less party-centered mode of political representation, and a shift towards more issue-specific or less ideological representation. The manuscript unpacks and discusses all these concepts in detail. Overall, it concludes that liquid democracy offers a very promising framework for scholars interested in rethinking and improving the theory as well as the practice of political representation in present-day democracies. This manuscript is an excerpt from a book manuscript on liquid democracy (Chapter 5). This is the second of three chapters in "Part II: A Liquid Conception of Democracy," which together aim to develop a normative theory of liquid democracy. This chapter builds on and expands arguments that were originally published in Valsangiacomo, Chiara (2021). Political Representation in Liquid Democracy. Frontiers in Political Science. 3. 10.3389/fpos.2021.591853.