---
title: Liquid Democracy
summary: "A voting system that combines direct and representative democracy through transitive delegation — citizens can vote directly on any issue, or delegate their vote to a trusted person who can re-delegate it further."
---

**Liquid democracy** (also called *delegative democracy*) is a voting system that attempts to combine the advantages of direct and representative democracy. In a liquid democracy:

- Any citizen can vote directly on any issue at any time
- Alternatively, a citizen can **delegate** their vote to someone they trust on a given topic or set of topics
- Delegations are **transitive**: your delegate can re-delegate your vote to their delegate
- Delegations can be **revoked at any time** — the system is "liquid" because the flow of voting power is constantly adjustable

The result is a spectrum: highly engaged citizens vote directly on everything; others delegate to specialists or trusted community figures; the rest delegate broadly. The system is designed to aggregate expertise without forcing participation on those who don't want it, while keeping power revocable rather than surrendered for a fixed term.

## Distinction from standard representation

In a conventional representative system, you vote for a representative who then decides on your behalf for a fixed term (typically several years), on all issues, regardless of your preferences on specific topics. Delegation in liquid democracy is:

- **Issue-specific** — you can delegate differently for different policy domains
- **Revocable** — you can take back your vote or change your delegate at any time
- **Transitive** — your delegate's network amplifies their influence proportionally

## Implementation

Liquid democracy has been implemented in several contexts:

- **Flux Party (Australia)** — used an issue-based variant ([IBDD](issue-based-direct-democracy.md)) for deciding how Flux senators would vote in parliament
- **LiquidFeedback** — open-source software platform used by the German Pirate Party and others
- **Google's Liquid Democracy experiment** — internal project exploring the model

## Criticisms

- **Superstar problem**: delegation can concentrate enormous voting power in a small number of highly trusted individuals, recreating a form of representation with less accountability
- **Complexity**: most citizens find it hard to manage delegations across many topics
- **Abstention dynamics**: if few citizens vote directly, outcomes may reflect a narrow active minority rather than broad preferences

## DOD discussion

- [Talk with Ben Ballingall about Flux Party and IBDD](../blog/posts/2020-02-13-podcast.md) — a 2020 DOD podcast in which Flux's Victorian representative explains delegation, the "hubris" problem with pure delegation, and how Flux's revocability mechanism is meant to address it


## See also

- [Issue-Based Direct Democracy](issue-based-direct-democracy.md) — Flux's specific implementation
- [Direct Democracy](direct-democracy.md)
- [Sortition](sortition.md) — an alternative approach to the representation problem
- [Loomio](../organisations/loomio.md) — worker cooperative building deliberative decision-making tools
- [Liquid Democracy e.V.](../organisations/liquid-democracy-ev.md) — Berlin non-profit developing Adhocracy+ and meinBerlin
- Wikipedia: [Liquid democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy)
