Interactive Democracy: New Challenges for Social Choice Theory

Interactive Democracy (aka e-democracy or digital democracy) is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of approaches to make collective decision making processes more engaging and responsive. A common goal of these approaches is to utilize modern information technology—in particular, the Internet—in order to enable more interactive decision making processes. An integral part of many interactive democracy proposals are online decision platforms that provide much more flexibility and interaction possibilities than traditional democratic systems. This is achieved by embracing the novel paradigm of delegative voting, often referred to as liquid democracy, which aims to reconcile the idealistic appeal of direct democracy with the practicality of representative democracy. The successful design of interactive democracy systems presents a multidisciplinary research challenge; one important aspect concerns the elicitation and aggregation of preferences. In this article, I argue that the emergence of online decision platforms and other interactive democracy systems leads to new challenges for social choice theory.