Submitted to the ‘Workshop on Linked Democracy: Artificial Intelligence for Democratic Innovation’ (Part of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Melbourne 1925 August 2017)
The economics of crypto-democracy
Darcy W. E. Allen1, Chris Berg1, Aaron M. Lane1 and Jason Potts1
1
School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
aaron.lane@rmit.edu.au
Abstract. Democracy is an economic problem of choice constrained by transaction costs and information costs. Society must choose between competing institutional frameworks for the conduct of voting and elections. These decisions are
constrained by the technologies and institutions available. Blockchains are a governance technology that reduces the costs of consensus, coordinating information, and monitoring and enforcing contracts. Blockchain could be applied to
the voting and electoral process to form a crypto-democracy. Analysed through
the Institutional Possibility Frontier framework, we propose that blockchain lowers disorder and dictatorship costs of the voting and electoral process. In addition
to efficiency gains, this technological progress has implications for decentralised
institutions of voting. One application of crypto-democracy, quadratic voting, is
discussed.
Keywords: Blockchain · Cryptoeconomics · Democracy · New comparative
economics · New institutional economics · Transaction cost economics · Voting
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Democracy as an economic problem
Democracy is an economic problem insofar as it consists of a choice subject to constraints made by acting agents with diverse preferences about their own ends (Buchanan
and Tullock 1962). As in market exchange, in democratic choice these constraints are
transaction costs and information costs, and are determined by the prevailing institutions and technologies available to individual voters, candidates, political parties, and
electoral agencies. Democratic institutions include laws governing elections and participation, rules controlling the provision of political information (such as free speech
or limits to free speech, speech or donation disclosure, truth in advertising laws, or
electronic advertising bans), and norms about democratic participation. Democratic
technologies include those which enable the distribution of information and knowledge
about democratic choice (such as the printing press or social media) and facilitate the
making of democratic choice (such as printed ballot papers). Constitutionally, societies
have to determine who gets to choose (the franchise), the domain over which that choice
is exercised (what social choices are to be governed democratically rather than through
market processes), and the mechanism by which that choice is exercised (both the form
of the democracy—i.e. representative or participatory—and the electoral system—i.e.
proportional or majoritarian). At a lower level, the institutional choices consist of the
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timing and location of elections, mechanisms to enroll and verify the identities of voters, the physical means by which the vote is made and recorded, whether individual
votes are made in public or are secret, the process by which votes are counted, along
with how they are verified, protected from tampering, and reported to a body for tallying.
All these decisions are constrained by the technologies and institutions available. Voter
identification provides an example of a democratic institution limited by the prevailing
level of technology. Before the British Reform Act of 1832, “the would-be voter appeared at the poll, tendered his vote, and then there swore an oath prescribed by statute
to the effect that he had the requisite qualification” (Maitland 1908, p. 355). While the
number of eligible voters was small, this was a small burden – in small boroughs individuals were likely to be recognized at the ballot box. The Reform Act both expanded
the franchise and mandated the creation of an electoral roll across Britain. These procedural changes prevented disputes about eligibility occurring at the ballot box itself,
but were also expected by their proponents to reduce the cost of the election (Seymour
1915, p. 107). Enrolling to vote in Australia in the twenty-first century requires either
an Australian driver’s license or an Australian passport—each with a color photograph
of the holder and digital security features—or the verification of an existing enrolled
voter how has previously passed the same.
As this suggests, technological and institutional changes have both expanded democratic possibilities and helped develop trust that individual votes—i.e. choices—are inputs into the social choice governed by the constitutional system. Technological advancement opens up alternative systems through which democracy might be practiced.
Representative democracy as it stands in the twenty-first century developed world has
been set according to the technological and institutional limits of prior centuries. In
order to underline this point, it is worth a brief diversion into the role that technology
played in equally ‘democratic’ but significantly different forms of democracy that have
prevailed in the past.
Ancient Athenian democracy was organised predominately by sortition rather than representation. Several hundred offices, including the membership of the governing Council of the 500, were filled each year by random allotment. Athenian juries were also
filled by lottery, as they still are today. For Aristotle, sortition was the defining characteristic of Athens’ identification as a democracy, and, as Headlam (1891, p. 1) writes,
for the modern mind ‘there is no institution of ancient history which is so difficult of
comprehension as that of electing officials by the lot’. Nevertheless, Athenian democracy faced many of the same practical constraints involving the selection and identification of potential office-holders and jurors. Participation in the lottery was not compulsory, but for those who chose to do so, identification was verified by ownership of
a bronze identity plate. These plates were slotted into a tall marble machine, the kleroterion, from which they were withdrawn according to the random roll of a dice. Offices
were allocated on the basis of the order the plates were withdrawn. The machine was
introduced first to reduce possible jury tampering (Ober 1989, p. 101), and Dow (1939)
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suggests that the potential for fraud to be committed by the operators of the machine
was prevented by running the procedure twice. Sortition was valued in part as a response to agency problems derived from political power (Berg 2015; Rancière 2009).
The introduction of the kleroterion, alongside the identification controls of the bronze
plates, provided a material increase in the ‘democraticness’ of Athenian democracy,
according to that society’s own conceptions of participation. In that case, technology
and technological change expanded the institutional possibilities of democracy and reduced the costs of those institutions.
In this paper, we consider the same potential with blockchain technology. The next
section will introduce the blockchain technology and consider its application for the
institutions of voting and elections, drawing on new comparative economics and transaction cost economics to provide a theoretical framework for analysis. In the final section, we consider quadratic voting as an implication of crypto-democracy.
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Blockchain and crypto-democracy
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto authored a white paper introducing blockchain technology
(Nakamoto 2008). Using the complex mathematics of cryptography, blockchains enable dispersed and pseudonymous people to coordinate information and govern exchange in a decentralized way. A blockchain acts as distributed publicly accessible and
secure ledger of information (Barta and Murphy 2014; Swan 2015). The first and most
famous application of blockchain was through the digital currency Bitcoin (Antonopoulos 2014; Böhme et al. 2015; Godsiff 2015). This was an effort to provide a trusted
non-territorial digital currency that was not reliant on a centralized bank and to operate
through financial intermediaries. But the potential applications of blockchains are much
broader than currency. For instance, blockchains may disintermediate and decentralize
law, contracts and government (Atzori 2015; Economist 2015a; Mougayar 2016; Popper 2015; Vigna and Casey 2015; Wright and De Filippi 2015). They can facilitate selfexecuting smart contracts in areas such as financial derivatives and gambling (Buterin
2014; Kõlvart et al. 2016; Szabo 1997), and create distributed autonomous organizations (De Filippi and Mauro 2014). Most generally, blockchains compete with centralized hierarchical organization, such as firms and governments. Functionally this implies
blockchains are a technology for creating new decentralized institutions (Davidson et
al. 2016). To the extent that modern economic growth is explained through the evolution of effective institutions, blockchain may prove to be a general purpose institutional
technology impacting many sectors and industries (Allen 2016; MacDonald et al.
2016).
Blockchains have also been raised as a potentially efficient solution for voting (Barnes
and Brake 2016; Daniel 2015; Osgood 2016). This application has been termed ‘cryptodemocracy’ (Davidson et al. 2016). The successful entrepreneurial application of blockchain involves outcompeting existing institutions for solving particular economic problems. Using the institutional possibility frontier (IPF) framework (developed within
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new comparative economics) we can compare the existing institutions for voting and
the electoral process and examine the effect of the introduction of blockchain.
There is no single institution for managing the voting and election process; rather we
can observe several institutional forms that exist on a spectrum of institutional possibilities. In making institutional choices society face a tradeoff between the costs of disorder, and the costs of dictatorship. How different institutions minimise these costs can
be mapped as an IPF (Djankov et al. 2003). Before examining the costs of dictatorship
and disorder in the electoral process, it’s first important to note that these costs are
subjectively perceived by each political actor (Allen and Berg 2016). Therefore, we
can, for instance, use experts’ perceptions of electoral integrity to understand this cost
tradeoff (Norris and Grömping 2017), as well as other historical examples of social
losses from the democratic process.
The costs of disorder for voting and the electoral process refer to the risk of private
expropriation such as individuals committing fraudulent registration, impersonation, or
voting multiple times. Prosecutions following elections provide evidence that these are
more than hypothetical risks to the system (e.g. The Electoral Commission 2016). To
the extent that voters have a preference in any poll, the failure of these preferences to
be captured by the system—e.g. measured by voter turnout—also represent disorder
costs.
The costs of dictatorship are the public expropriation of the voting process by public
actors. This could include overt practices such as ballot-stuffing, vote rigging and manipulated results, which may happen where electoral officials favor the incumbent candidate or ruling party (Norris and Grömping 2017). Dictatorship costs will be present
where the centrally controlled electoral register is inaccurate, either through ineligible
voters being registered or eligible voters left off the list (Norris and Grömping 2017).
Dictatorship costs include not just public malfeasance, but also negligence. An example
of this is in the Australian 2013 Federal election, where the High Court ruled that the
Senate election for the State of Western Australia was invalid because the Australian
Electoral Commission had lost 1370 ballot papers (Australian Electoral Commission v
Johnston [2014] HCA 5, 2014). Some phenomena will reflect costs of both disorder
and dictatorship. One example of this is bribery, where the distinction will depend on
whether it is a public or private actor that is collecting the bribe. The same can be said
of integrity of the system, and the costs of enforcing the results. Violence is yet another
example. That is, disorder is present when private actors deny other individuals from
exercising their voting rights, such as through violence or fear of violence (e.g. Norris
and Grömping 2017), whereas dictatorship will be present in instances of state-sponsored violence (e.g. Schedler 2002).
Centralised and decentralized institutions manage these dual costs in different ways.
Centralised institutions limit the perceived costs of disorder by having a centrally managed voter registry and having full authority over the conduct of elections, and limits
costs involved in duplication, but increases the perceived costs of dictatorship because
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these circumstances introduce risks that the process could be (internationally or negligently) manipulated by state actors to favor a party or candidate. Laws maintaining the
electoral commission’s independence guard against the worse of the perceived dictatorship costs. In contrast, decentralised institutions limit the dictatorship costs associated with concentrated power by introducing competition and choice between jurisdictions, but this introduces the risk of perceived costs of disorder by giving more power
to individuals and relying on private collective action.
At this point, we can begin to construct an institutional possibilities frontier for managing the voting and election process, illustrated in Figure 1. First, on the right of the IPF,
a single centralised electoral authority, controlled by the ruling candidate or party in an
election. Second, a centralised electoral authority established as impartial and independent of the government of the day (e.g. the Australian Electoral Commission, responsible for conducting the electoral system for federal representatives across the
country). Third, a decentralised system with several electoral authorities (e.g. in the
United States, each state is responsible conducting elections of their own federal representatives). Fourth, on the left of the IPF, an arrangement of multiple privately managed
systems (e.g. there are several for-profit services that provide voting and election services, used mainly by public companies and membership organisations).
Fig. 1. Institutions of voting and the electoral process
Let us now return to the effect that blockchains have on the institutional environment.
Blockchains are a governance technology reducing the costs of consensus, coordinating
information, and monitoring and enforcing contracts. Indeed, given that democracy is
itself an economic problem of coordinating preferences—with various potential comparatively efficient institutional solutions—it is somewhat unsurprising that blockchains may be applied to democracy. At the time of writing the most prominent application for blockchain for online voting is FollowMyVote.com, who claims to embody
“all of the characteristics that a legitimate voting system requires: security, accuracy,
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transparency, anonymity, freedom, and fairness” using blockchain (followmyvote.com
2017). Claims over the potential of blockchain technology for voting are in effect arguing that blockchain technology comparatively decreases the various costs of dictatorship and disorder, including “robustness, anonymity and transparency” (Lee et al.
2016). Put another way, following the transaction cost economics framework of Oliver
Williamson (1975), we can view blockchains as economising on the costs of uncertainty and opportunism in a decentralized way.
Of course, there is the potential that crypto-democracy could be applied within a centralised institutional possibility. A centralised electoral commission could, for example,
use blockchain technology to maintain their electoral role which has integrity and transparency benefits, meaning that the voting process would be harder to manipulate and it
would reduce the possibility of human error. But we anticipate that the major benefits
for crypto-democracy will be for decentralized institutional possibilities ordinarily typified by higher perceived costs of disorder, as a decentralised ledger decreases the many
of those costs (e.g. fraudulent registration, security, enforcement, duplication, etc.)
without needing to rely on central control. For this reason, we propose that the introduction of the blockchain technology to the voting process—crypto-democracy—
causes an inward shift in the IPF, skewed towards reducing the perceived costs of disorder. This is shown in Figure 2.
Fig. 2. Introduction of the blockchain technology
The majority of current proposals focusing on using blockchain for voting examine
what appear to be pure efficiency gains for voting on the blockchain. However, an inward shift in the IPF due to the discovery of blockchain technology also presents the
possibility of institutional entrepreneurship to discover new possibilities within the IPF
space for solving the broader democratic problem (see Allen and Berg 2016). That is,
the implication of an inward shift of the IPF implies more institutions are possible, not
what those institutions are in practice. We explore one new institutional possibility to
solve the democratic problem in the following section, quadratic voting.
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3
A new institution of democracy: quadratic voting on the
blockchain
Quadratic voting (QV) is a new voting mechanism proposed by Lalley and Weyl
(2014). Posner (2016) suggests that "Quadratic voting is the most important idea for
law and public policy that has emerged from economics in (at least) the last ten years".
The basic idea is that the millennia old democratic franchise model of one-person-onevote (1p1v) has the unfortunate but well-known flaw in that it is economically inefficient because it entirely ignores intensity of preference. If I care only a little about an
issue and you care a lot (maybe it affects you more), we both have an identical voting
margin. This leads to well-known problems with 1p1v such as tyranny of the majority.
This means that issues that affect a minority of citizens, yet have significant welfare
consequences for them (Lalley and Weyl offer gay marriage as an example), can be
blocked by a casually indifferent majority. This is Pareto inefficient: there are clear
opportunities for gains from trade. Lalley and Weyl (2014, p 2) explain that “1p1v offers no opportunity to express intensity of preference, allowing inefficient policies to
persist. … The basic problem is that 1p1v rations rather than prices votes, resulting in
externalities across individuals.” They propose that the QV mechanism can resolve this
problem (see also Posner and Weyl 2014).
QV works by introducing a payments mechanism into voting but, crucially, each voter
is on both sides of the market: you pay to vote (buying votes along a quadratic pricing
schedule, e.g. if 1 vote costs $1, 2 votes costs $4, 3 votes costs $9, 10 votes costs $100,
100 votes costs $10,000), but you also get paid after the vote (the payments go into a
pool to be redistributed among all voters). QV is therefore both a vote pricing schedule
and a reallocation mechanism. Lalley and Weyl (2014) show that the QV mechanism
is, in the limit, ‘robustly efficient’ (Lalley and Weyl 2014, p 1) (recall the 1p1v mechanism is not efficient): QV induces revelation of true preferences, aggregates those
preferences, and then compensates those affected by the decision.
There are several points to note about the QV mechanism: it overlooks persuasion; it
has implementation challenges; and it has high transactions costs. First, it implements
an exchange and compensation mechanism (which is the logic of seeking to improve
the Pareto efficiency of an outcome where all citizens have given preferences). But an
alternative mechanism—implicit in the 1p1v mechanism when understood in the context of an economy—is that citizens may seek to persuade each other to change their
preferences, or to adopt better preferences. 1 The economic logic of this has recently
been developed by Almudi et al. (2017) and Potts et al. (2017) in an evolutionary group
selection (replicator dynamic) model they call ‘utopia competition’, in which agents
use their own economic resources to seek to persuade other agents to adopt their own
‘utopia’ preference bundle. Evolutionary utopia selection model preserves 1p1v, but
1
This critique was also made by Tyler Cowen on his blog Marginal Revolution: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/my-thoughts-on-quadratic-voting-and-politics-as-education.html
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the compensation mechanism works through costly persuasion rather than transfer.
However, the claim is the utopia selection is also more efficient than 1p1v.
Second, as an abstract mechanism QV is asymptotically efficient. But there are still a
number of implementation challenges for secure voting in relation to verifiability, robustness against false accusations, and secrecy. Park and Rivest (2016) have proposed
a number of specific mechanisms using cryptographic techniques (including homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs) to resolve the issues of anonymity and
payments efficiency using cryptocurrency. However, they acknowledge that the problem of overcoming collusion (which is an inherent instability in QV, which Lalley and
Weyl acknowledge but offer no solution) remains problematic. However, the central
message of Park and Rivest (2016) is that many of the problems of robustness in implementation can be resolved by adding cryptography to the mechanism.
A third constraint on QV, and arguably the most immediately practical problem at any
non-trivial scale of application, is high transaction costs. That makes it infeasible in
practice compared to 1p1v, which is for all its Pareto economic inefficiency is actually
a low cost solution in exchange and contract because there is no exchange and contract
(and thus has high transactions cost efficiency). This is a point that neither Lalley and
Weyl (2014) nor Posner and Weyl (2014) really address. We therefore emphasise that
the ‘crypto’ solution to robustness suggested by Park and Rivest (2016) also extends to
a general transaction cost solution in the form of QV on the blockchain.
Quadratic voting should be understood as a mechanism that is inherently implemented
on a blockchain at the point of voter identification, robustness and verification of the
bidding and tallying mechanism, and security and transactional efficiency of the vote
buying, fund pooling, and redistribution mechanism. By envisaging and implementing
the QV mechanism in the context of a platform such as Ethereum, which enables smart
contracts in which a citizen preprogram their preferences and then allow their software
agent (or Distributed Autonomous Organization) to in effect automate the trades and
voting and to make and receive payments, the transactions cost constraint on QV in an
analog world is significantly reduced. The shift to a blockchain-platform also suggests
other prospective applications that address problems of collective decision making over
distributions of preference intensity, but which for transactions costs reasons get caught
in low Pareto efficiency mechanisms, such as the turgid representative democracy of
corporate governance or city councils. 2
2
For instance what Potts et al (2017b) call quadratic zoning (Quadratic voting + blockchain = quadratic
zoning). This weighted voting mechanism combined with redistribution of funds enables efficient coalition
formation and internal transfers to create welfare maximizing urban rezoning. With quadratic zoning there is
no need for urban planning, but rather urban zoning can evolve.
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4
Conclusion
The basic economic problem of democracy is to coordinate preferences between distributed people. This is an institutional problem, constrained by transaction costs and
information costs, and therefore available technologies. Given that blockchain is an
institutional technology for creating decentralized institutions, in this paper we have
examined the potential for blockchain to open up new institutional possibilities of
crypto-democracy. We focused on one new institutional possibility opened up through
blockchain, quadratic voting, and its potential to more effectively solve the democratic
problem.
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