What is liquid democracy?

A system in which, for each issue, you choose either to vote yourself or to entrust your vote to someone you trust. The person you entrust can pass it on again to someone else, and you can take your vote back at any time and cast it yourself.

In an election, you pick someone once every few years, and after that you leave everything to them. But you might think: "On health care I trust that person, but on education I want to decide for myself." Liquid democracy is the idea of letting people choose, issue by issue and at any time, whether to delegate or to decide themselves. The word "liquid" describes votes flowing from person to person like water.

In short

Liquid democracy is a system in which, for each issue, you can choose to vote yourself or to entrust your vote to someone you trust. The person who receives it can pass that vote on to someone else. And you can take it back at any time and vote yourself [1][2][3].

For example

A small example (made up for illustration). Suppose a five-member neighborhood association is deciding on "renovating the park" [1][2].

A entrusts their vote to B, who knows a lot about plants.
B passes on B's own vote and A's, 2 votes in all, to C, a landscaping expert.
C casts 3 votes, including C's own.
D and E each cast 1 vote themselves.

That is 3 + 1 + 1 = 5 votes in total, the same as the number of people. If A is not convinced by C's plan, A can stop delegating on this issue alone and vote directly. On a different issue, such as "how tax money is spent", A is free to entrust their vote to D, who knows accounting.

Germany's Pirate Party (late 2000s to 2010s). According to the German-language Wikipedia, Germany's Pirate Party promoted liquid democracy as an alternative to today's parliaments, and used delegation of votes in forming opinions inside the party. When delegations were passed on again and again, large numbers of votes gathered in a few people, who were called "super-delegates". In 2012 a party IT officer said that the 79 votes delegated to that officer could vanish overnight after a misguided move [1].

Friesland district, Germany (2012–2015). Also according to the German-language Wikipedia, this district set up "LiquidFriesland", a citizen participation platform run on liquid democracy. But citizens did not use it from the start. A platform in another district that followed was not used either: as of February 2017, its most recent post was a year old [1].

Examples given in the book. The book ⿻ Plurality says such systems are "increasingly common, especially in corporate and other for-profit (e.g. DAO) governance, as well as in a limited set of political contexts such as Iceland". RadicalxChange, a nonprofit that promotes Plurality, has implemented a system related to combining liquid democracy with square-root weighting (quadratic liquid democracy) for its internal decision-making [3][4].

How it works

Three features

The German-language Wikipedia sums up three differences from ordinary representative government [1]:

Fine-grained delegation. You can delegate for a single decision, or for a whole area such as "the environment".
Revocable at any time. There is no need to wait for the next election.
Re-delegation. The person you delegate to can pass the vote on to someone else.

The French-language Wikipedia, following a paper by the researcher Bryan Ford, lists principles such as: anyone can easily become a delegate, delegates' decisions are made public, and individual votes are kept secret. It adds that liquid democracy can be seen as a combination of direct democracy (everyone decides for themselves) and representative democracy (decisions are left to representatives) [2].

The book's explanation and the origins

In chapter 5-6, the book explains that liquid democracy "extends the idea of proportional representation, allowing any voter to delegate their vote(s) to others, who may then re-delegate them, allowing bottom-up, emergent patterns of representation" [3].

The book traces the idea back to "the path-breaking work of Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, author of the children's classic Alice in Wonderland)", a study of parliamentary representation published in 1884. The book says that Dodgson also "first posed the question of weighting of votes for people holding multiple votes that helped inspire QV" (Quadratic Voting) [3].

A line from Japan: divicracy

A footnote in the book introduces "Dividual democracy a.k.a 'divicracy'", proposed by the Japanese researcher and entrepreneur Ken Suzuki. "Unlike LQ, divicracy includes not only delegation of one's vote to others but also splitting one's vote to multiple political issues." Suzuki "introduced the concept in 2000s and elaborated in his book in 2013", The Nameraka Society and its Enemies [5]. Suzuki's official website explains that one vote can be split and cast for both policies and people, that delegated votes can be re-delegated, and that votes already cast can be changed at any time [6].

In the age of AI

A 2023 white paper by the research organization Collective Intelligence Project lists liquid democracy as one way of drawing out people's values, and mentions experiments in using it to design recommendation systems [7]. When OpenAI called for projects to bring citizens' voices into AI, it also listed liquid democracy as one of the options [8]. The book itself imagines digital assistants that learn a voter's views and vote on their behalf, subject to the voter's review [4].

What is debated

Votes pile up with a few people. The book itself admits that "these systems have an unfortunate tendency to concentrate power often excessively, given that delegation often flows to a small number of hands. This tendency has somewhat soured initial enthusiasm" [3]. The Pirate Party's "super-delegates" have often been cited as an example of this. The German-language Wikipedia also writes, however, that because delegated votes can be withdrawn at any time their power is limited, and that research found super-delegates mostly used their votes in line with the wishes of those who had delegated to them [1].
Nobody uses it. As in Friesland, citizens may not take part even when a platform is built [1].
Secrecy versus verifiability. The German-language Wikipedia notes that Germany's Constitutional Court judged that electronic voting which fully combines ballot secrecy with the ability to check that votes were counted correctly is, for now, technically difficult. So one system deals with this by making votes public, but, it writes, secret ballots such as elections of officers then have to be held separately. There is also criticism that people unused to digital devices are put at a disadvantage [1].
Proposals for improvement. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, counts liquid democracy among the good examples of mechanisms that sit between democracy and markets [9]. In 2025 he introduced a proposal by Eliezer Yudkowsky: each person chooses a delegate, only delegates who gather roughly 50 to 200 votes hold power, and this is stacked two or three levels high to form a parliament. Buterin wrote that it is less prone to populism, but needs to be tried somewhere first [10].

Where it fits in Plurality

In chapter 5-6, "⿻ Voting", the book presents liquid democracy and Quadratic Voting as the two recent developments that "have offered exciting, though incomplete, approaches" [3].

On liquid democracy's weak point, the concentration of power, the book writes that "a natural way to avoid the power concentrations that liquid democracy can give rise to is the use of degressive proportionality" — square-root weighting, in what it calls "quadratic liquid democracy" [4]. It also says that "sophisticated forms of liquid democracy" may help form new kinds of coalitions that cut across existing divides, so that compromise need not throw away diversity [11].

Around the Plural Management Protocol used to run the making of the book, the Japanese translators also proposed, in April 2024, a way of distributing contribution points through delegation inspired by liquid democracy [12].

Sources

Liquid Democracy, German-language Wikipedia (in German) — https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Democracy
Démocratie liquide, French-language Wikipedia (in French) — https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9mocratie_liquide
Plurality, 5-6 "⿻ Voting tomorrow" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-6 "Frontiers of voting" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-6, footnote (Divicracy) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/ ［CC0］
Ken Suzuki, official summary of Nameraka (Smooth) Society and Its Enemies — https://nameteki.kensuzuki.org/book-summary-enjazh-tw
Collective Intelligence Project white paper (2023) — https://www.cip.org/whitepaper
OpenAI, "Democratic Inputs to AI" (2023) — https://openai.com/index/democratic-inputs-to-ai/
Vitalik Buterin, "Blockchain voting is overrated among uninformed people but underrated among informed people" (2021) — https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/05/25/voting2.html
Vitalik Buterin, "Let a thousand societies bloom" (2025) — https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/12/17/societies.html
Plurality, 5-6 "Limits of ⿻ voting" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/ ［CC0］
Token distribution plan for Japanese translators, V2 (Cosense, in Japanese) — https://scrapbox.io/plurality-japanese/%E7%BF%BB%E8%A8%B3%E8%80%85%E3%81%AE%E3%81%9F%E3%82%81%E3%81%AE%E3%83%88%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AF%E3%83%B3%E9%85%8D%E5%B8%83%E3%83%97%E3%83%A9%E3%83%B3V2

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