Flexible representative democracy
提出一种结合代议制与直接民主的投票系统，允许选民调整代表在不同议题上的权重，通过计算模型比较多种投票制度的优劣，发现灵活代议民主在提高投票参与度时能改善决策结果。
Abstract We introduce Flexible Representative Democracy (FRD), a novel hybrid of Representative Democracy and Direct Democracy in which voters can alter the issue-dependent weights of a set of elected representatives. In line with the literature on Interactive Democracy, our model allows the voters to actively determine the degree to which the system is direct versus representative. However, unlike Liquid Democracy, Flexible Representative Democracy uses strictly non-transitive delegations, making delegation cycles impossible, and maintains a fixed set of accountable, elected representatives. We present Flexible Representative Democracy and analyze it using a computational approach with issues that are binary and symmetric. We compare the outcomes of various voting systems using Direct Democracy with majority voting as an ideal baseline. First, we demonstrate the shortcomings of Representative Democracy in our model. We provide NP-Hardness results for electing an ideal set of representatives, discuss pathologies, and demonstrate empirically that common multi-winner election rules for selecting representatives do not perform well in expectation. To analyze the effects of adding delegation to representative voting systems, we begin by providing theoretical results on how issue-specific delegations determine outcomes. Finally, we provide empirical results comparing the outcomes of various voting systems: Representative Democracy, Proxy Voting, and FRD with issue-specific delegations. Our results show that variants of Proxy Voting yield no discernible benefit over unweighted representatives and reveal the potential for Flexible Representative Democracy to improve outcomes as voter participation increases.