The Democratic Governance and New Technology workshop will bring together political scientists, economists, and computer scientists to explore the growing use of democratic tools to govern the online world.
The workshop, which will take place on July 8th at the EC Conference, will consist of a set of invited paper presentations and a poster session for which we are seeking submissions.
This workshop will be about the design of new voting and governance systems for both the online and offline world.
To what extent can we apply voting systems from the physical world to online governance, and to what extent must they be modified to mitigate unique challenges in the online world, such as Sybil attacks and user apathy?
Does technology create opportunities to design new voting systems—such as “liquid democracy” systems that allow voters to delegate votes to experts across issues—that work better than systems designed under previous physical constraints? Or are there fundamental limitations rooted in incentives and human behavior that limit how much new voting systems can achieve?
How can the opportunity to experiment with different voting systems in the online world help us to learn about these questions and ultimately to improve our understanding of how to build optimal governance structures for the online and offline worlds?
Questions like these are timely, because the tools of voting and democracy are increasingly being used to govern online platforms, communities, and new technologies like AI and AR/VR. In web3, protocols design “constitutions” that enshrine their voting rules and other governance procedures in code. In AI, companies including Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI have announced experiments with citizens’ assemblies to help make decisions concerning guardrails for their technologies.
Opportunities to study the links between incentives, governance design, and political behavior at the scale and granularity allowed for by these online experiments are historically unusual. In the same way that economists and computer scientists have collaborated so fruitfully in recent years, our goal is to foster deeper connections between political scientists, computer scientists, and economists to take advantage of these new online governance laboratories. To do so, in this workshop we will discuss research ideas and techniques in this emerging area of academic study.
We have been confirmed for the afternoon of July 8th. Here is a tentative schedule for the poster session and paper presentations:
1-2pm: Poster session (joint with other workshops)
2-2:30pm: Alexandra Cirone presentation
2:30-3pm: Bailey Flanigan presentation
3-3:30pm: coffee break
3:30-4pm: Andy Hall presentation
4-4:30pm: Brett Falk presentation
4:30-5pm: coffee break
5-5:30pm: Ethan Bueno de Mesquita presentation
Alexandra Cirone, Yale University ISPS and Cornell University: “Selective Voices in Deliberative Mini-Publics: Self Selection and Citizens’ Assembly Participation in the US.”
This paper experimentally studies a potential weakness of deliberative mini-publics — self selection. Any type of citizens' assembly involves random or weighted sampling of participants in the invitation stage, but non-random participation or take-up in the deliberation stage. Citizens who actually decide to participate in deliberative democracy are most likely different than those who choose to decline the invitation. In particular, this is a problem in polarized environments, such as the US -- if citizens with high levels of affective polarization don’t participate, this has significant implications for interpretation of prior work which has found self reported positive effects for (self selected) participants. Using a representative sample of 5,000 US adults, I run a series of survey experiments that employ treatments that explore affective polarization and anticipated group composition, to then study willingness to participate in different types of online and offline deliberative mini-publics. This experimental work can shed light on incentives to participate in citizens’ assemblies, under bipartisan conflict.
Bailey Flanigan, CMU Computer Science: “Fair, Manipulation-Robust, and Transparent Sortition.”
This paper studies how to simultaneously ensure three ideals considered in past work on sortition: fairness (ensuring no one receives too little chance of selection), manipulation-robustness (reducing incentives for people to try to increase their chances of selection by misreporting their features), and transparency (being able to select the final panel via a physical lottery).
Andy Hall and Sho Miyazaki, Stanford GSB: “How Does Delegation Affect Participation in Online Governance?”
This paper offers an empirical assessment of how voting systems that allow for delegation (or liquid democracy) work in practice. Using data from more than 20 DAOs, we document patterns of delegation and compare them to theoretical predictions, and we show that voting participation increases when DAOs build online systems that encourage voters to find delegates.
Brett Falk, UPenn CS: "Blockchain governance: Crowdsourcing and safety"
In this talk, we examine how several common blockchain voting systems (direct voting, approval voting, quadratic voting) fare as mechanisms realizing the wisdom of the crowd (e.g. for finding the optimal parameter settings, or identifying honest block producers). Next, we consider how these mechanisms fare for protecting the safety of the protocol (i.e., preventing hostile takeovers) while still allowing for permissionless participation.
Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Harris School, University of Chicago: “Hold-Up, Innovation, and Platform Governance.”
Motivated by large digital platforms, I study a model of platforms choosing fees, upgrades, and governance to compete over a two-sided market of producers and consumers. By solving an interoperability-driven hold-up problem, governance increases producer investment in product quality; however, by preventing fee-adjustments, it causes platforms to under-invest in upgrades. This trade-off persists even if platforms choose their preferred level of interoperability, which is higher without governance than with. When governance is necessary for producers to invest in quality, platforms under-provide governance relative to the social optimum. Whereas, when producers invest in quality regardless of governance, platforms over-provide governance.
Stanford GSB
Columbia University and a16z crypto