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.