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The current UK (and other) political stems work on the concept of “proxying” my vote on all issues to a local representative, which I would pick by choosing one that represents my beliefs as closely as possible, and therefore in theory who then votes according to my beliefs.

Recently I’ve been thinking about whether it would be possible for that “proxy” process to be more scoped. Instead of a single representative for all issues in government, I could pick one for matter of defence, one for matters of environment, yet another for matters of technology etc etc

I’m very new to understanding the political process and the different systems used around the world, but I do not think for a moment that I’m the first person to consider this.

So does this theoretical setup of governance have a name?

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    Why would this system not be party affiliated? There are commonly multiple levels of government. But the different levels often have the same parties. Note that the United States was founded by people who distrusted parties. Yet the US system was dominated by two parties within a couple generations.
    – Brythan
    Nov 5, 2018 at 23:52
  • A previous post about a similar idea.
    – Brythan
    Nov 6, 2018 at 1:37

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Yes there have been quite a few proposed systems somewhere between the common Representative Democracy and Direct Democracy. Such is the case for Delegative Democracy (or Liquid Democracy) where:

Delegative democracy, also known as liquid democracy, is a form of democracy whereby an electorate has the option of vesting voting power in delegates rather than voting directly themselves. The term is a generic description of either already-existing or proposed popular-control apparatuses. Voters can either vote directly or delegate their vote to other participants; voters may select a delegate for different issues. In other words, individual A of an X society can delegate its power to another individual B – and withdraw such power again at any time.

There is no nation wide implementation of the system but there a few attempts at shorter scales. For example some Pirate Parties use the LiquidFeedback software as an approach to this system. (note: these movements typically support E-democracy initiatives and the two concept tend to be intertwined).

Pirate Parties, parties focusing on reducing online censorship and increasing transparency, first came around in Sweden in the year 2006. Pirate Parties in Germany, Italy, Austria, Norway, France and the Netherlands use delegative democracy with the open-source software LiquidFeedback.

Specifically in the case of the Pirate Party in Germany, the communication with citizens uses tools and platforms similar to conventional parties – including Facebook, Twitter, and online sites – however, they developed the “piratewiki” project. This is an open platform opened to collaborative contributions to the political deliberative process. 'Liquid Feedback' was the platform used by the German Pirate Party since 2006, which allowed users to become a part of inner party decision making process

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