Why Liquid Democracy is a Terrible Idea

If this was democracy it would be terrible.

In recent years the concept of liquid democracy, aka delegative democracy, has become popular, and I've heard it advocated by a lot of smart people. The basic concept is that, rather than electing a single individual as the representative of your community to act on your behalf on all matters, you can choose individuals to vote on your behalf on specific areas of governance. In other words, if someone is recognized as a particular authority on some area of legislation, people will delegate their vote to that person on those issues. The hope is that votes on particular legislation will be made more intelligently and with less party politics, corruption and other issues undermining the whole system.

Like many things, I think this is an idea that sounds great in theory but is probably terrible in practice (or at best, just as bad as representational democracy). I think it is mistaken in much the same ways that people in the 90s gushed about how the internet would level playing fields and give a voice to everyone, and how the wisdom of the crowds would make all the important news and information rise to the top, rather than the advertising driven, clickbait, mob virality ecosystem ruled by large corporations such as Google and Facebook that we actually ended up with.

If you see elected representatives as simply there to stand as a proxy for the people who elected them, a simple sum of what each of those people would have voted for on a particular issue, then it's easy to see why people might consider them an unnecessary burden. But elected representatives aren't just opinion accumulators. Their job (at least when they actually do it properly!) is to spend the time to understand issues and vote on behalf of the people who elected them. Individual citizens don't have the time to have deep understanding of all of the issues that are part of running a society. It's good to have some awareness of issues so you can better judge if your representative is doing a good job, but the point is to pick someone who you trust to act on your behalf and spend the time you don't have to hopefully make better decisions.

Now, given this, it would seem like liquid democracy might give better results. The main problem is that most people are lazy, uninformed, and unwilling to spend much time.

For liquid democracy to work, it requires people to typically pick a greater number of delegates. Some people will take the time and effort to do that, of course, but most people probably wont. They will pick one or a very small number of people. And how will they decide? Rather than any kind of nuanced investigation, they'll just tend to go with whomever their peers go with.

So let's consider a particular area that is contentious, like reproductive rights. Do you think that most Americans will delegate their vote on these issues to scientists? Or do you think they think the relevant authorities on these issues are rather their pastors and priests? And how progressive will those results end up?

Or how about climate change. How many people will delegate to respected climate scientists, and how many will delegate to that "maverick" climate scientist that Fox News told them to delegate to?

The problem with delegating to authorities is that most people don't have a clue who the authorities are! They take their cues from biased news organizations, their religious leaders, and whatever shows up in their Twitter/Facebook feed, so these are the actual authorities they're effectively delegating to. And the result would be shit.

Liquid democracy considers its agility to be a virtue, but in a lot of ways, the relative slowness of our current systems can actually be useful. Having people in power for a certain length of time allows them to actually get things done without constantly worrying about having their "authority" revoked, which is considered a feature of liquid democracy. If there's anything we should have learned from social media in the present, it's just how quickly stupid shit can become viral and huge numbers of people get obsessed with it, and then just as quickly disappear and the next viral thing becomes the most important thing ever. Having a system that can smooth out these opinion spikes as people jump on different bandwagons is becoming increasingly important, and liquid democracy seems particularly fragile to it.

Perhaps I've just become very cynical. Where some people see citizen journalism and an internet where every voice can be heard, I see clickbait, virality of articles that arouse anger and outrage, and no one wanting to pay for real journalism. Where some people see the sharing economy and apps that empower people, I see corporations exploiting people and avoiding regulations and legal obligations. And where some people see the empowerment of individuals to play a greater role in the democratic process, I see a small number of individuals taking the time and effort to do it right, and the majority making terrible delegation decisions that result in an even worse system than what we currently have.