Optimizing Viscous Democracy

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.