The Hague, The Netherlands — October 9–10, 2025
At the Digital Democracy The Hague 2025 conference, the Horizon Europe project PERYCLES — Participatory Democracy that Scales participated in the Academic Track with a dedicated session exploring how digital technologies can strengthen democratic legitimacy and enable participatory decision-making at scale.
Davide Grossi (University of Groningen)
The session opened with an overview of the PERYCLES project by Davide Grossi, who introduced the project’s interdisciplinary approach to designing digital democracy solutions that scale.
PERYCLES develops methodologies and tools for the evidence-based and normatively principled design of digital platforms that support large-scale democratic deliberation. Grossi outlined how the project integrates insights from computational social choice, deliberative democratic theory, and platform engineering to make democratic participation both inclusive and analytically robust.
Élise Rouméas & Anna Mikhaylovskaya (University of Groningen)
The second presentation, delivered jointly by Élise Rouméas and Anna Mikhaylovskaya, focused on the role of compromise in democratic decision-making. While deliberation has long been central to the literature on digital democratic innovations (DDIs), the ideal of compromise—understood as a reciprocal exchange of concessions—has been largely overlooked. They emphasized the importance of fostering a non-transactional attitude that does not perceive compromise as a sign of weakness but as a constructive and cooperative democratic virtue.
Rouméas and Mikhaylovskaya argued that institutional design can do more than make compromise a necessity: it can cultivate a compromising mindset and facilitate the practice of concession-making. Their presentation explored how DDIs, when designed with this in mind, can foster both the spirit and practice of compromise, enabling democratic systems to handle deep disagreement while maintaining legitimacy and mutual respect. As food for thought, they offered a few suggestions to foster compromise, including creating space for individual storytelling, which echoes the idea that emotional expression can help overcome impasses where rational reasoning alone falls short.
Axel Kistner (LiquidFeedback)
In the third talk, Axel Kistner, co-founder of LiquidFeedback, introduced the LiquidFeedback process, which supports policy-driven proposition development. Kistner explained the process along an easy-to-understand and relatable storyline, deliberately framed in non-ideological terms to illustrate the mechanisms without reference to partisan content. Through this narrative, he showed how the platform enables transparent, inclusive, and scalable collective decision-making via structured online deliberation and transitive proxy empowerment.
He addressed key challenges—ensuring meaningful debate without moderator intervention, preventing domination by vocal minorities, and maintaining fairness toward dissenting voices—and demonstrated how LiquidFeedback’s process architecture and preference aggregation algorithms effectively manage these issues. He also showed how LiquidFeedback’s preferential voting method, based on the Schulze algorithm, mitigates the negative effects of clone alternatives and discourages tactical voting, thereby supporting genuine preference expression. The talk further emphasized how institutional design and computational mechanisms together foster democratic self-governance in large, diverse communities.
Andreas Nitsche (Association for Interactive Democracy)
Andreas Nitsche closed the session with a deep dive into liquid democracy, beginning with its prototypical model—single-choice transitive proxy voting—and its key features. He then showed how LiquidFeedback extends this model “beyond voting” to all quantifiable aspects of deliberation. Nitsche explained the delegation overlay, which arises from a delegation hierarchy. While generated differently, the resulting structure remains fully compliant with the prototypical model, demonstrating equivalence in structural outcome. He also elaborated on suspension, which separates an agent’s decision on direct activity from delegation management, while maintaining theoretical consistency by building on existing features of liquid democracy.
Drawing on his joint publication with Davide Grossi, Nitsche introduced a process-centered model of influence, interpreting transitivity and power as emergent properties of interacting agents rather than static features of the network. He then examined adaptive representation patterns and network plasticity, drawing an analogy to neural adaptation. In this view, domain-specific delegation patterns foster epistemic specialization, self-regulation, and continuous learning. Through dynamic rewiring, the network maintains a balance between stability and flexibility, forming the “brain” of an organization that supports institutional memory and trust.
The PERYCLES session at Digital Democracy The Hague 2025 exemplified the project’s ambition to combine theoretical rigor, institutional insight, and technological innovation in pursuit of scalable, inclusive, and transparent democratic participation. By bridging political philosophy, computational modeling, and practical platform experience, PERYCLES continues to explore how digital infrastructures can enhance democratic legitimacy, deliberative quality, and citizen empowerment across contexts and scales.
