Toward Delegated Democracy: Vote by Yourself, or Trust Your Network

Authors: Hiroshi Yamakawa, Michiko Yoshida, Motohiro Tsuchiya

Abstract:

The recent development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enables new ways of "democratic" decision-making such as a page-ranking system, which estimates the importance of a web page based on indirect trust on that page shared by diverse group of unorganized individuals. These kinds of "democracy" have not been acclaimed yet in the world of real politics. On the other hand, a large amount of data about personal relations including trust, norms of reciprocity, and networks of civic engagement has been accumulated in a computer-readable form by computer systems (e.g., social networking systems). We can use these relations as a new type of social capital to construct a new democratic decision-making system based on a delegation network. In this paper, we propose an effective decision-making support system, which is based on empowering someone's vote whom you trust. For this purpose, we propose two new techniques: the first is for estimating entire vote distribution from a small number of votes, and the second is for estimating active voter choice to promote voting using a delegation network. We show that these techniques could increase the voting ratio and credibility of the whole decision by agent-based simulations.

Keywords: Delegation, network centrality, social network, voting ratio.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1060773

References:

[1] R. D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
[2] K. Minetaki, and M. Yoshida, "Service Innovation Generated by Innovation in ICT --- Blogs/SNSs and Innovation ---The Effect of Blogs/SNSs as seen from a Survey of Employees," Fujitsu Research Institute Research Paper, No. 282, 2006.
[3] K. Krippendorff, Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology, Sage Pubns, 1980.
[4] M. G. Sirken, "A Short History of Network Sampling," in Proc. SRMS, 1998.
[5] S. K. Thompson, "Adaptive Web Sampling," Biometrics, vol.62, no.4, pp.1224--1234, 2006.