The paper Modeling Liquid Democracy: A Survey of the (Computational) Social Choice Literature by Davide Grossi, Andreas Nitsche, and Georgios Papasotiropoulos was presented on August 19, 2026, in the Survey Track of IJCAI-ECAI 2026, the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in Bremen, Germany. It is published in the official conference proceedings.
The paper provides a systematic survey of the computational social choice literature on liquid democracy. It addresses the fragmentation of the field by identifying the fundamental modeling choices underlying different approaches and organizing them through a common taxonomy. This makes it possible to compare how different models represent delegation, voting, participation, power, and the dynamics of collective decision-making.
The survey also identifies directions for future research and discusses the relationship between theoretical models and practical systems. These research directions include extending formal models beyond one-time issue voting, examining delegation structures with overlapping scopes, studying how delegation networks evolve over time, developing more adequate concepts of power and influence, and strengthening the empirical foundations of liquid democracy research. LiquidFeedback is discussed as an example of how liquid-democratic mechanisms have developed in practice beyond the settings commonly represented in theoretical models.
The paper appears in the Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Survey Track, pages 7855–7863.
