Interactive Democracy

Interactive 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. However, existing proposals are mostly disconnected from the vast body of scientific literature on preference aggregation and related topics. In this article, I argue that tools and techniques developed in the multiagent systems literature should be employed to aid the design of online decision platforms and other interactive democracy systems. Insights from computational social choice, an emerging research area at the intersection of computer science and economics, will be particularly relevant for this endeavor.