Flexible Representative Democracy: An Introduction with Binary Issues
- Intro
- Flexible Representative Democracy to the rescue.
Direct democracy (DD) has been practiced since ancient Athens, but doesn’t scale - logistically or in terms of citizen knowledge. Instead we have adopted Representative Democracy (RD) but this has inherent trade-offs: citizens vote once and are then represented, the system has no flexibility and citizens end up not represented on their true opinion. Interactive democracy has entered the research field to answer this.
“FRD maintains a set of expert representatives while allowing voters to guarantee their own representation without raising the voters’ minimum required burden.” In FRD voters delegate their vote, as in a RD, but they have the option to change their allocation at any time. So there is the default RD with the option for the active DD democracy.