Majority and Representation: A Political Economy Analysis of It-Enabled Democracy

Abstract

Following an increasingly large corpus of literature championing blockchain-based voting systems, this paper disentangles the issues that are blockchain specific and those that belong to the larger scope of e-voting. I provide a political economics analysis of e-voting under different constitutional settings. Using analytical tools from the fathers of Public Choice, I argue that switching to e-voting without modifying the institutions is unlikely to modify choice mechanisms. I then extend the analysis to Liquid Democracy and find that, while it can be well suited to small scales communities, it faces major limitations at large scale because it fails to provide a framework for bundling. All along the paper, examples based on blockchains are discussed to illustrate the analysis and link it with recent literature.