2024/05/08 by Ben Armstrong, Armstrong, Ben, Shiri Alouf-Heffetz +3 · 1 citation
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #FOS: Physical sciences #Game Theory and Voting Systems #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.06698
openalex publication_date 2024/05/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Viscous democracy is a generalization of liquid democracy, a social choice framework in which voters may transitively delegate their votes. In viscous democracy, a "viscosity" factor decreases the weight of a delegation the further it travels, reducing the chance of excessive weight flowing between ideologically misaligned voters. We demonstrate that viscous democracy often significantly improves the quality of group decision-making over liquid democracy. We first show that finding optimal delegations within a viscous setting is NP-hard. However, simulations allow us to explore the practical effects of viscosity. Across social network structures, competence distributions, and delegation mechanisms we find high viscosity reduces the chance of "super-voters" attaining large amounts of weight and increases the number of voters that are able to affect the outcome of elections. This, in turn, improves group accuracy as a whole. As a result, we argue that viscosity should be considered a core component of liquid democracy.