Another example is how to balance privacy with accountability. A classic example is the secret ballot, in which the voters know whom they are voting for, but the politicians do not know how individual citizens voted. In more complex systems, finding the right balance can be a real challenge, for example concerning government employees. How can citizens doing business with the government be assured they are being treated fairly, while respecting a degree of privacy for government employees? How can responsible whistle-blowers call attention to problems without endangering their careers? These questions will become acute as we move toward new political systems, facilitated by modern communication technologies, in which many people are constantly shifting roles, being a common citizen at one point in time, a political leader at a second point in time, and a valued worker carrying a public responsibility at a third point. We cannot establish immutable design principle now for the political systems of the future, but we must constantly consider issues like these as we move forward through a period of innovation and experiment.
A good starting point is the statement by the Liquid Democracy Squad of the Berlin Pirate Party, a group of about two dozen members who discussed the possibilities from September 30, 2009, until March 24, 2010. Their key idea was this:
Each participant can decide how far he wants to shoulder his own interests, or how far he wants to be represented by others. In particular, he may at any time reclaim his delegated voting right, and this does not have to wait until a new election period. This results in a network of delegations that is constantly in flux. [1]
As conceptualized by the Berlin group, an individual has considerable liberty to determine how he or she would be represented. With respect to tax law, the person may select political Party A as the representative, while for environmental policy selecting Party B. Instead of a party, the person may select another individual. And these decisions can be changed at any time.
It is easy to imagine how this could be handled online. Each person would have a private page inside a password-protected governmental database. It would list some moderate number of areas of government decision making, with the option after each to select registered political parties from a drop-down menu, or to insert the name and unique ID number of another individual person. The database would constantly tabulate support for each party in each topic area, calculating weighting variables to calibrate the relative power of that party to decide the next specific vote in that area. Thus a party’s strength in Parliament would be decided not by how many of its politicians had won seats in the most recent election, but by the momentary fraction of the electorate that had selected it to represent them on the particular issue at hand.
In cases when Voter A delegated to Voter B, there are two possibilities. First, Voter A’s party choice could copy Voter B’s party choice, changing whenever Voter B changed a party selection. Second, if Voter B achieves some threshold number of delegations from other voters, Voter B could become in effect an independent member of Parliament. The balance between party influence in Parliament, versus the influence of individual delegates representing many people but without a party organization, could change over time and across issues. In addition, each voter might have several selection pages in the secure online database, one for local government, one for regional government, one for national government, and ideally even one for world government.
Presumably, each political party, and each unaligned individual delegate, would have a public web page listing positions on the various general issues. It is conceivable that some party or solo delegate might choose to communicate privately, even in secret, with individual voters, and no technical barrier prohibits this. However, democracy generally benefits from broad public discussion, and this system assumes that some kind of public debate has identified what the distinct issue areas are. It is one thing to say that tax policy is logically separate from environmental policy, but when a decision must be made about taxing emissions from a polluting industry, the picture becomes complex.
When it comes time to implement Liquid Democracy, there will be a host of very specific technical questions, including many about the processes used to identify opinion leaders and topic areas. The simple idea just presented of a government database with a private page for each voter is only one of many possible ways to proceed, and a modern political system may require combining several of them. Furthermore, we have not considered yet how a political party would develop its platform, and we should imagine how advanced information technology might manage that difficult process. Without pretending at this early point to know which methods should be used in what combination, we can catalog possible components of a twenty-first century political system based on Internet.
A very large number of information technology methods have been developed recently to support group decision making, and they can be assembled in different ways. Many of them have not generally been presented in political terms, so it will take some imagination even to recognize some of the valuable technological resources available to us. Here we shall consider only three: reputation systems, recommender systems, and online group formation systems.
From a certain perspective, Google is a political entity, ruling world culture by deciding where people will find the information they desire, in terms of the most complex classification system that has ever existed, and a dynamic one at that. It is political because it is based on the equivalent of voting, in the form of links people put on their web pages to other people’s pages. Without getting into details, the Google search engine uses two kinds of data. One is the words written on a web page, and the other is the pattern of links coming to a web page. A key part of the mechanism is the pagerank algorithm — actually a class of algorithms that assign a score to each web page in terms of the links coming to it, adjusted by the ranks of the pages that sent those links (Page et al 1998*; [2]).
For example, consider the English-language Wikipedia page of Pirate Parties International. To find many of the web pages that have links to this particular page, one can enter into Google: “link:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Parties_International.” On October 21, 2011, Google listed 141 such pages, including some belonging to branches of the party, as well as pages in many different languages. Entering “link:www.piratenpartei.de/” turns up fully ten times as many web pages. It is even possible to enter two “link:” URLs, and get a listing of all the pages that link to both of the two target webpages, which can become a metric of how similar those two pages are, in comparison with other pairs of pages that might have more or fewer common in-coming links.
Thus Google page rank is first of all a measure of popularity, but also data that can be used to map web pages in terms of similarity. Of course we should be cautious about using Google as our voting system. Yes, one can easily tabulate the relative numbers of in-coming links for the web pages of politicians, but this is not the same thing as their popularity with voters. Many of the highly ranked pages sending links may belong to ideological organizations, venial corporations, or crazy fanatics who put up many webpages that draw attention for being bizarre, not for being wise. Yet as a technical method akin to a voting system, the Google search engine has been remarkably successful and may have lessons for those who wish to reform the political system in the light of advanced communication technology.
1
http://wiki.piratenpartei.de/Liquid_Democracy ; accessed and translated, October 21, 2011.