Abstract
We introduce Flexible Representative Democracy
(FRD), a novel hybrid of Representative Democracy (RD) and Direct Democracy (DD), in which
voters can alter the issue-dependent weights of a
set of elected representatives. In line with the literature on Interactive Democracy, our model allows
the voters to actively determine the degree to which
the system is direct versus representative. However, unlike Liquid Democracy, FRD uses strictly
non-transitive delegations, making delegation cycles impossible, preserving privacy and anonymity,
and maintaining a fixed set of accountable elected
representatives. We present FRD and analyze it using a computational approach with issues that are
independent, binary, and symmetric; we compare
the outcomes of various democratic systems using Direct Democracy with majority voting and full
participation as an ideal baseline. We find through
theoretical and empirical analysis that FRD can
yield significant improvements over RD for emulating DD with full participation