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Direct voting and proxy voting

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  • James Green-Armytage

Abstract

I develop a hybrid of direct democracy and representative democracy in which each citizen may vote directly on each issue, or delegate his vote on any issue to a representative (that is, a proxy) of his own choosing. I construct both an axiomatic argument for such a system and an argument based on its ability to ameliorate the information problems inherent in both direct and representative democracy. I also propose practical measures for implementation, including new variations on existing proxy system proposals. These new variations include a ‘Dodgsonesque’ procedure, a proportional agenda-setting procedure, a provision for virtual committees, and a provision for continual consideration of issues. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Suggested Citation

  • James Green-Armytage, 2015. "Direct voting and proxy voting," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 26(2), pages 190-220, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:copoec:v:26:y:2015:i:2:p:190-220
    DOI: 10.1007/s10602-014-9176-9
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. James Green-Armytage, 2023. "A Dodgson-Hare synthesis," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 34(3), pages 458-470, September.
    2. Dhillon, Amrita & Kotsialou, Grammateia & Xefteris, Dimitris, 2021. "Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes," SocArXiv ubk7p, Center for Open Science.
    3. Joseph Campbell & Alessandra Casella & Lucas de Lara & Victoria Mooers & Dilip Ravindran, 2022. "Liquid Democracy. Two Experiments on Delegation in Voting," Papers 2212.09715, arXiv.org.
    4. Jacqueline Harding, 2023. "Proxy Selection in Transitive Proxy Voting," Papers 2307.02627, arXiv.org.
    5. Reshef Meir & Fedor Sandomirskiy & Moshe Tennenholtz, 2020. "Representative Committees of Peers," Papers 2006.07837, arXiv.org.
    6. Paul Harrenstein & Marie-Louise Lackner & Martin Lackner, 2019. "A Mathematical Analysis of an Election System Proposed by Gottlob Frege," Papers 1907.03643, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2020.
    7. Arnold Cédrick SOH VOUTSA, 2020. "Approval Voting & Majority Judgment in Weighted Representative Democracy," THEMA Working Papers 2020-15, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
    8. Jacqueline Harding, 2022. "Proxy selection in transitive proxy voting," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 58(1), pages 69-99, January.
    9. Sang-Hyun Kim, 2021. "Transitive Delegation in Social Networks: Theory and Experiment," Working papers 2021rwp-192, Yonsei University, Yonsei Economics Research Institute.
    10. Pivato, Marcus & Soh, Arnold, 2020. "Weighted representative democracy," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 52-63.
    11. Hans Gersbach, 2022. "New Forms of Democracy," CESifo Working Paper Series 10134, CESifo.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Proxy voting; Direct democracy; Participatory democracy; Deliberative democracy; Liquid democracy; Proportional representation; D7;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making

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