Liquid democracy has developed into a broad field of research spanning political science, economics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and social choice. While transitive vote delegation is its most characteristic feature, theoretical models differ considerably in how they represent delegation, voting, participation, power, and the dynamics of collective decision-making.
In Modeling Liquid Democracy: A Survey of the (Computational) Social Choice Literature, Davide Grossi, Andreas Nitsche, and Georgios Papasotiropoulos provide a systematic survey of research on liquid democracy in computational social choice. The paper addresses the fragmentation of the existing literature by identifying the fundamental modeling choices underlying different approaches and organizing them through a common taxonomy.
The paper Modeling Liquid Democracy: A Survey of the (Computational) Social Choice Literature by Davide Grossi, Andreas Nitsche, and Georgios Papasotiropoulos was presented in the Survey Track of IJCAI-ECAI 2026, the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, in Bremen, Germany.
Liquid democracy systems with transitive and suspendable delegations, as implemented in LiquidFeedback, raise a fundamental question: how should the power of individual participants be measured when delegations can propagate through a network but can also be suspended by voting directly?
In Power in Liquid Democracy: A Network Centrality Approach, the authors develop a computationally tractable framework for measuring power in such systems. They introduce expected voting weight and show its connection to Random Walk Decay centrality, providing a basis for analyzing power distributions and identifying representative sets of influential participants.
Davide Grossi presented Power in Liquid Democracy: A Network Centrality Approach, co-authored with Andreas Nitsche, Georgios Papasotiropoulos, Oskar Skibski, Piotr Skowron, and Tomasz Wąs, 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.
Researchers and practitioners met at the University of Bucharest for the Bucharest Workshop on Digital Democracy and Inclusivity, organized by the PERYCLES consortium. The workshop examined how digital democracy can expand democratic participation while also creating new challenges for inclusion. Its program covered liquid democracy, online citizens’ assemblies, digital deliberation, artificial intelligence, digital inclusion, and democratic legitimacy.