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 over the structure of democracy are constrained by the technologies and institutions available. As a governance technology, blockchain reduces the costs of coordinating information and preferences between dispersed people. Blockchain could be applied to the voting and electoral process to form new institutional possibilities in a cryptodemocracy. This paper analyses the potential of a cryptodemocracy using institutional cryptoeconomics and the Institutional Possibility Frontier (IPF). The central claim is that blockchain lowers the social costs of disorder in the democratic process, mainly by incorporating information about preferences through new structures of democratic decision making. We examine one potential new form of democratic institution, quadratic voting, as an example of a new institutional possibility facilitated by blockchain technology.

1 Introduction

Blockchain technology provides the governance infrastructure for economic coordination and exchange, including the potential of coordinating distributed preferences

through collective action (Berg 2017c; Davidson et al. 2016, 2018; MacDonald et al. 2016). Indeed, researchers have recently starting examining the potential of blockchain to create new structures of governance. For instance, the original Ethereum White Paper (Buterin 2014)—one of the world’s largest blockchain-based platforms—suggests ‘liquid democracy’, where voters are free to delegate and contract with representatives of their choice, as one possible blockchain use case. Berg (2017b) provides a political and economic analysis of blockchain delegative democracy. Other blockchain applications involve the use of blockchain technology to set political party policy on a distributed basis, such as Australia’s MiVote, or to ensure anonymity in board room voting, such as The Open Vote Network Smart Contract (McCorry 2017). What is lacking in these applications, however, is an understanding of democratic exchange as an economic coordination problem. The primary focus of this paper is to provide conceptual clarity about the economic function and institutional structure of voting and democratic coordination. Specifically, we apply the institutional possibility frontier (IPF)—first outlined in new comparative economics (Djankov et al. 2003)—to the economic problem of democratic governance. In particular we demonstrate how blockchain technology opens up new institutional possibilities by theoretically lowering the costs of coordinating preferences in democracies.

In Section 2 we consider democracy as an economic problem that is bounded by prevailing technological limitations. Section 3 considers the impact of blockchain technology on the institutions of voting and elections, drawing on new comparative economics and transaction cost economics to provide a theoretical framework for analysis. In Section 4 we examine quadratic voting as an example of democratic coordination within a cryptodemocracy, and how such an institutional system may economise on some of the transaction costs inherent in collective action decision making. This analysis provides insight into the potential institutional structure of a cryptodemocracy.

2 Democracy as an economic problem

Democracy is an economic problem insofar as it consists of a choice subject to constraints made by agents with diverse preferences about their own ends (Buchanan and Tullock 1962). As in market exchange, in democratic choice these constraints are transaction costs (Coase 1937; Williamson 1975). Because of these transaction costs— including information costs about the preferences of others—institutions are created to coordinate between individual voters, candidates, political parties, and electoral agencies. Participants in a democracy must not only choose between competing policies, but also the institutions through which those choices and preferences will be coordinated.

Many decisions must be made regarding the structure and process of democratic decision making. Societies must determine the 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. Various technologies are used to aid the democratic process, including those that distribute 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. This choice includes both the form of the democracy—such as representative or participatory—and the electoral system itself, such as proportional or majoritarian. Furthermore, at a lower level, we must choose the timing and location of elections, mechanisms to enrol 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 (Berg 2017a). For this reason is it worth looking back in historical context to examine the economic problems underpinning democracy and how technologies have changed the potential governance solutions to those problems. One example of a democratic problem limited by the prevailing level of technology is voter identification. Before the British Reform Act of 1832, Bthe 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). While the number of eligible voters was small, this was a trivial burden—in small boroughs individuals were likely to be recognised 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). Enrolling to vote in many countries in the twenty-first century requires either a driver licence or a passport—each with a colour photograph of the holder and digital security features—or the verification of an existing enrolled voter who has previously passed the same requirement. We are now also seeing the emergence of electronic voting identification, such as in Estonia. As this suggests, technological and institutional changes have both expanded democratic possibilities and helped develop trust that individual votes—that is, choices—are inputs into the social choice governed by the constitutional system. Technological advancement opens up alternative systems through which democracy might be practiced.

The basic structure of the democratic system—such as through sortition of representation—has also changed through time as new technologies have developed. Indeed, possibilities for the structure of democracy have been constrained according to technological and institutional limits. Ancient Athenian democracy was organised predominately by sortition rather than representation. Several hundred offices were filled each year by random allotment. For Aristotle, sortition was the defining characteristic of Athens’ identification as a democracy, and, as Headlam (1891) writes, for the modern mind Bthere 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), and Dow (1939) 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 modern times we have seen communication technologies and transportation technologies facilitate representative Westminster democracy. The question that we now examine is how blockchain technology will shift the institutional structures of democracy, with a focus on the integration of preferences into decision making.

3 Blockchain and cryptodemocracy

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto authored a white paper introducing blockchain technology (Nakamoto 2008). Using cryptography, blockchains enable dispersed and pseudonymous agents to coordinate information and govern exchange in a decentralized way. A blockchain can act as distributed publicly accessible and secure ledger of information (Barta and Murphy 2014; Swan 2015). The first and most famous application of blockchain was the creation of a ledger of digital money, Bitcoin (Antonopoulos 2014; Böhme et al. 2015; Godsiff 2015). This was an effort to provide a trusted digital currency that was not reliant on centralised banks and financial intermediaries. The potential applications of blockchains, however, extend beyond currency, including the decentralisation of law, contracts and government (Atzori 2015; Mougayar 2016; Popper 2015; Vigna and Casey 2015; Wright and De Filippi 2015). Blockchains can facilitate self-executing smart contracts in areas such as financial derivatives and gambling (Buterin 2015; Kõlvart et al. 2016; MacDonald et al. 2016; Szabo 1997), enable distributed autonomous organisations (DAOs) (De Filippi and Mauro 2014), and other applications within areas such as global supply chains, health, finance, identity and civil society. More generally, blockchains are tools for entrepreneurs to develop governance structures to compete with centralised hierarchical organisations, such as firms and governments (Davidson et al. 2018). Applications of blockchains including smart contracts and DAOs mean that blockchains facilitate economic coordination. Functionally this implies blockchains are a technology for creating new decentralised institutions of governance (Davidson et al. 2016). It is unsurprising, then, that blockchains have been raised as a technology to facilitate democratic voting—that is, creating a cryptodemocracy where some of the institutions of democratic decision making are ordered through blockchain technology (Barnes et al. 2016; Daniel 2015; Osgood 2016).

How would a cryptodemocracy be structured? Would a cryptodemocracy simply be a more efficient operation of our current system of democracy, or would it have a fundamentally different shape? As the voter identification and the selection of representatives examples outlined above demonstrate, a cryptodemocracy facilitated through blockchain technology may take a fundamentally new shape. Indeed, 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. We apply the institutional possibility frontier (IPF) framework—developed within new comparative economics (Djankov et al. 2003)—to compare the existing institutions for voting and the electoral process and hypothesise over the impact of the introduction of blockchain.

Applying the logic of the IPF suggests that when making a choice over democratic institutions, society faces a trade-off between two main types of costs: the costs of dictatorship and the costs of disorder. How different institutions minimise these costs can be mapped between these competing costs, forming an IPF curve (Djankov et al. 2003).

The costs of dictatorship and disorder within the IPF theoretical framework are subjectively perceived by each of the political actors in a society (Allen and Berg 2017). Because each of the costs of different structures of democratic decision making are subjectively perceived by the individual—and because there are opportunity costs in that choice—there is perpetual uncertainty surrounding a cost minimising solution. These costs will also differ across jurisdictions given prevailing norms and institutions—what Djankov et al. (2003) call civic capital. For this reason 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. We can, however, outline some of the theoretical costs of dictatorship and disorder in democracies.

The costs of disorder in a democracy refer to the risk of private expropriation. For instance, individuals may commit fraudulent registration on voter roles, impersonate other voters, or vote multiple times. Each of these acts impose costs on others. As prosecutions following elections show, disorder costs within the democratic process are more than just hypothetical risks. There are also less recognised costs of disorder associated with voting and the democratic process, including the failure to adequately incorporate and capture voter preferences within a collective decision. To the extent voters have a preference for a given poll, these disorder costs could simply manifest in low voter turnout. At a higher level, given that the economic problem of democracy is to coordinate preferences between multiple parties in the face of uncertainty and positive transaction costs, any preferences not incorporated can be considered disorder costs.

The costs of dictatorship include the 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 favour the incumbent candidate or ruling party. 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, such as bribery. In the case of bribery the distinction will depend on whether it is a public or private actor that is collecting the bribe. The same can be said of the integrity of the electoral system, and the costs of enforcing the results. Violence is yet another example that has different costs depending on the situation. For instance, disorder costs are clear when private actors deny other individuals from exercising their voting rights, such as through violence or the fear of violence (Norris and Grömping 2017), whereas dictatorship costs will be present in instances of state-sponsored violence (e.g. Schedler 2002).

Centralised and decentralised institutions economise on the dual costs of disorder and dictatorship 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. Centralised institutions also theoretically limit the costs of duplication. However, centralisation also increases the perceived costs of dictatorship by introducing risks that the process could be (intentionally or negligently) manipulated by state actors to favour a party or candidate. Laws maintaining the electoral commission’s independence guard against the worst 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.

Given the dictatorship and disorder costs outlined above we can develop an IPF for the voting and electoral process, illustrated in Fig. 1. The IPF for a democratic system represents the range of institutional possibilities as a trade-off between the costs of dictatorship and disorder. 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 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, where 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). As with all costs, the shape and location of an IPF is subjectively perceived (Allen and Berg 2017). What we can say, however, is that if the costs of dictatorship and disorder do not trade-off in a linear way, then there is some cost-minimising interior solution closest to the origin. Where precisely this interior institution is, however, is in part a function of the available technologies.

Let us now return to the effect that blockchains have on the institutional environment. We call the institutional systems of voting and collective decision making using decentralised blockchain technology a cryptodemocracy. Blockchains are a governance technology reducing the costs of consensus, coordinating information, and monitoring and enforcing contracts and therefore may be applied to overcome the dictatorship and disorder costs of democratic governance. At the time of writing one of the most prominent blockchain applications for online voting is FollowMyVote.com, who claims to embody Ball of the characteristics that a legitimate voting system requires: security, accuracy, 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). Following the transaction cost economics framework of Oliver Williamson (1975), blockchains economise on the costs of uncertainty and opportunism.

Fig. 1 Institutions of Voting and the Electoral Process.

In what way would we expect blockchain technology to lower the costs of dictatorship and disorder, thereby changing the shape of the IPF? On one hand, blockchain could be applied to overcome some of the costs of dictatorship that come through the centralised institutional possibilities. For example, a centralised electoral commission could use blockchain technology to maintain their electoral role. This would bring integrity and transparency benefits, meaning that the voting process would be harder to manipulate and it would reduce the possibility of human error. This would theoretically shift the ‘dictatorship’ end of the IPF curve inwards, moving the cost-minimising solution closer to centralised possibilities, because there are fewer chances for public expropriation.

However, we propose that the impact of blockchain as a new governance structure for democracy will disproportionately decrease the costs of disorder. A cryptodemocracy might not just make current democratic systems more efficient, but can use blockchain as the infrastructure to enable entirely new decentralized institutional possibilities. Blockchain may be applied as a decentralised ledger to create new structures of decision making that were previously infeasible due to high coordination costs and disorder costs. In particular, blockchain—and as we see in one example in Section 4 below, quadratic voting—reduces coordination costs to incorporate more and deeper preferences within the democratic process. In this way the rise of delegative and liquid democracy as well as quadratic voting—all of which are made possible through blockchain technology—are fundamentally attempts to lower the disorder costs of preference coordination. Therefore we suggest that the broad application of blockchain in a cryptodemocracy may lead to an inward shift in the IPF skewed towards reducing the perceived costs of disorder, illustrated in Fig. 2.

Many of the 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 invention 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 2017). That is, the inward shift in Fig. 2 can be interpreted as opening up an entirely new space of institutional possibilities between IPF₁ and IPF₂ that are yet to be discovered. For instance, there is now greater potential for societies to begin to unbundle political goods (MacDonald 2015) or delegate their voting power to others (Berg 2017a). The implication of an inward shift of the IPF implies more institutions are possible, not what those institutions are in practice. For this reason we now turn to one potentially new institutional possibility to solve the democratic problem, quadratic voting. We focus on quadratic voting not because it is necessarily a preferred method of democratic governance, but because it is an example of an institutional possibility that is now potentially possible given the invention of blockchain technology.

4 A new institution of democracy: quadratic voting on the blockchain

One of the costs of disorder within democratic decision making is incurred when preferences fail to be incorporated into collective action. These disorder costs not only include when votes are not counted—for instance, a low voter turnout—but also when the intensity of those preferences is not integrated into the collective decision. Democracies face an intensity of preferences problem because individuals not only have different perceptions, but because those perceptions have differing intensities

Fig. 2 Introduction of Blockchain Technology.

(Buchanan and Tullock 1962). This is the case not just for public voting for governments, but also in the private sphere, such as for shareholder voting in corporations. In this context the conventional democratic franchise model of one-person-one-vote (1p1v) and majority rule is economically inefficient because it ignores these intensity of preferences, potentially leading to the tyranny of the majority where the majority oppresses the minority (e.g. see Adams 1788). Put another way, Bthe rule of simple majority applied to a single issue of collective choice, may provide minor gains in utility for a majority at the cost of imposing major losses in utility on a minority^ (Rowley and Schneider 2008). Issues that affect a minority of citizens, yet have significant welfare consequences for that minority, can be blocked by a casually indifferent majority. This is Pareto inefficient: there are clear opportunities for gains from trade through forms of logrolling (e.g. see Holcombe 2006). In this way one of the challenges of 1p1v is that individuals do not have a mechanism to express their preference intensity because votes are rationed. How can price be introduced into the system in order to account for these intensities?

Lalley and Weyl (2018) propose Quadratic Voting (QV) as a potential voting mechanism to overcome this problem (see also Posner and Weyl 2015). QV was described by Eric Posner (2014) as Bthe most important idea for law and public policy that has emerged from economics in (at least) the last ten years.^ QV introduces prices into voting in order to incorporate preference intensity. In a system of QV, each voter is on both sides of the market. On one side individuals pay to vote and buy votes along a quadratic pricing schedule—for example, if 1 vote costs $1, 2 votes costs $4, 3 votes costs $9 and so on. These payments go into a collective pool. On the other hand, individuals also get paid after the vote from the collective pool where the money is redistributed on a per capita basis. Therefore QV is both a vote pricing schedule— introducing intensity of preferences through the potential to buy more votes—and a reallocation and redistribution mechanism—as the collective pool is allocated back to the franchise as compensation. The QV mechanism is, in the limit, ‘robustly efficient’ in part because it induces revelation of true preferences, aggregates those preferences, and then compensates those affected by the decision. Indeed, as Quarfoot et al. (2017) note: BQV forces the marginal cost of voting to be proportional to the number of votes purchased, and as a consequence, creates an efficient space in which voting is proportional to value.^ While QV may be the Bthe latest step in a series of incremental understandings of collective decision-making over more than half a century^ (Tideman and Plassmann 2017), how can it work in practice?

While QV may appear theoretically efficient—that is, reducing the disorder costs of democratic coordination—there are several challenges implementing it in practice: prevailing norms and stigma against pricing votes and vote buying; the transformation of economic inequality into political inequality (Laurence and Sher 2017); voter participation (Quarfoot et al. 2017); questions of democratic legitimacy when applied to the political sphere (Ober 2017); the effects of persuasion; implementation challenges such as verifiability; and the high transactions costs in a more complex system. Our focus here is on the latter two, and how blockchain technology in a cryptodemocracy may help overcome these costs and make QVan institutional possibility.

Challenges remain regarding secure voting in relation to verifiability, robustness against false accusations, and secrecy. Some of these challenges of implementing a QV system, however, have been lowered through technologies such as blockchain. For instance, votes may be securely and verifiably delegated or transferred between voters without a centralised intermediary. The central message of Park and Rivest (2017) is that many of the problems of robustness in implementation can be resolved by adding cryptography to the mechanism. They have proposed a number of specific mechanisms using cryptographic techniques—including homomorphic encryption and zeroknowledge 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) remains problematic. A second 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). We therefore emphasise that the solution to the robustness problem suggested by Park and Rivest (2017) also extends to a general transaction cost solution in the form of QVon the blockchain.

While many of the challenges of QV outlined above will continue, we believe many of these can be overcome through the use of blockchain technology in a cryptodemocracy. Blockchain can be used for 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. In this context we can see that while QV may have been theoretically an abstractly efficient solution to some democratic challenges of dictatorship and disorder, it is only through new technological advances, and an inward shift in the IPF, that these new institutions become possible. In particular, the use of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts may enable more preferences—and the intensity of those preferences through quadratic voting—to enter into the democratic process. These new institutional possibilities could be implemented through an existing platform, such as Ethereum, that enables smart contracts in which a citizen could pre-program their preferences and then allow their software agent (or DAO) to automate the trades and voting and to make and receive payments. This could significantly reduce the coordination cost challenges of implementing QV, thereby opening up new institutional possibilities within the IPF space. The shift to a blockchain-based platform also suggests other prospective applications that address problems of collective decision making over distributions of preference intensity, but which for transactions cost reasons get caught in low Pareto efficiency mechanisms.

5 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 decentralised institutions, in this paper we have examined the potential for blockchain to open up new institutional possibilities of cryptodemocracy. Blockchain, in this view, shifts the Institutional Possibility Frontier of democracy inward, suggesting there are new possible institutions for collective action that will be discovered. In particular we proposed that the IPF will shift inwards disproportionately relating to disorder costs because blockchain enables more effective governance and coordination of preferences. Finally we focused on one of these new democratic possibilities to introduce more incentives into the system, quadratic voting, and its possibility to be governed through blockchain technology. Quadratic voting— together with other institutional possibilities such as delegative democracy and liquid democracy—facilitated through blockchain in a cryptodemocracy may enable more preferences to enter into collective decision making, thereby helping to ameliorate some of the fundamental information costs and disorder costs of democracy.

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