The research paper “Power in Liquid Democracy: A Network Centrality Approach” by Davide Grossi, Andreas Nitsche, Georgios Papasotiropoulos, Oskar Skibski, Piotr Skowron, and Tomasz Wąs develops a new framework for measuring power and influence in liquid democracy.
The paper focuses on systems with transitive and suspendable delegations, as implemented in LiquidFeedback. Instead of treating the nominal number of delegated votes as a measure of power, the authors introduce expected voting weight. This accounts for the fact that participants can always vote directly and thereby suspend their delegations. The resulting measure corresponds to Random Walk Decay centrality, providing a computationally tractable way to analyze how influence propagates through delegation networks.
The paper also explores how these methods could be used for practical power-distribution analytics and for identifying representative sets of influential participants in liquid-democracy systems. Davide Grossi presented the work on 6 July 2026 at the 3rd Workshop on New Directions in Social Choice, co-located with the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC 2026) in Rome, Italy.
Access paper on arXiv | DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2608.13188
This research was supported by the EU Horizon Europe project PERYCLES for Davide Grossi and Andreas Nitsche, the ERC project PRO-DEMOCRATIC (101076570) for Georgios Papasotiropoulos and Piotr Skowron, the National Science Centre (2023/50/E/ST6/00665) for Oskar Skibski, and the EPSRC (EP/X038548/1) for Tomasz Wąs.
