By Yu-Shan Tseng, University of Southampton
Democracy is one of those ‘big buzz words’ that can trigger different reactions and theoretical assumptions. Worse, not all systems that claim to be democratic live up to their promise. In Liquid Democracy, I rethink what democracy is from the urban worlds that are becoming more fluid than ever. With cities being increasingly mediated by digital platforms, decision–making processes about cities are becoming more and more fluid like liquid bodies – dynamic and changeable. The term ‘liquid’ is a useful metaphor to illustrate how digital platforms dissolve ‘the norms’ associated with political actions, decisions and processes in (or about) urban worlds. This fluid condition provides new opportunities and challenges for democracy. While voting in a general election is prone to interference by AI in social media platforms, bespoke platforms allow for alternative participatory processes where ordinary people can take collective actions that make a difference to the urban worlds.
For example, Digital Democracy Platforms (DDP) allow more citizens and residents to make political decisions – those which commonly fall within the remits of councillors, MPs and policymakers. In Madrid, residents are able to decide, for example, how to spend a budget of up to 100 million euros on projects for their boroughs (or for the whole city). In Taipei, residents can provide opinions in revising legislation on controversial issues such as Uber’s legal status. Platform-facilitated participatory processes provide new opportunities for marginalised urban communities and individuals to make decisions that improve everyday spaces from cultural heritage to community centres, from those for drug abusers and gig workers.
Liquid Democracy focuses on three DDPs – Decide Madrid in Madrid, Omastadi in Helsinki, and vTaiwan in Taipei. DDPs, built in open-source software, are used by hundreds of municipalities or governments around the world to facilitate participatory processes from participatory budgeting in Madrid to consultation for controversial issues such as Uber’s legal status in Taipei. Both Decide Madrid and vTaiwan have received international acclaim from the United Nations Public Service Award in 2018 to the BBC’s praise of vTaiwan as an inspiration for consensus democracy for Western societies to learn.
Liquid Democracy offers a comparison of three DDPs based on years of ethnographic research. The comparison allows me to treat each platform as a liquid that flows through the urban world. Using this idea, I identify three confluences where these different worlds flow together. These confluences help make sense of democracy and how democracies come about. If we start democracy from its fluid and dynamic worlds, then we see democracy as movements between history and present, between present and future, and as moments in fluid situations.
The first confluence situates DDPs in democratic movements that swing between different powers and times. Democracy manifests as movements converging around consensus over political-economic matters within ongoing tensions between the people’s resistance and the authoritative regimes throughout the 1960–80s in Finland, Taiwan and Spain. Such movements become recurring power struggles between the people and any forms of hegemonic powers in contemporary times, especially the social movements against democratic decisions over controversial issues of trade and economics in Taipei and Madrid in the 2010s.
The second confluence examines how democracy emerges when DDPs were invented and brought into destabilising normative policy-making processes. DDPs render make it possible to imagine futures in which consensus governance is possible. They also open up alternative futures through deliberations and collective actions when they become entangled with the urban world.
The third confluence then identifies moments and situations where democracy turns up as multiple practices and possibilities in the fluidity of the digital and urban worlds. This includes (but is not limited to) when Machine-learning algorithms identified plural viewpoints in the Uber controversy in Taipei, when technical frictions and power contestations evoked care for the marginalised in Madrid, when different people were brought together to create collective stories in making claims to urban place and space in Helsinki.
What do these liquid worlds mean for democracy?
Liquid democracy rethinks democracy from its liquid worlds, where normative decisions and procedures are destabilised in the worlds made up by platforms, people and cities. What these liquid worlds reveal to us is to consider those that are cut off by any democratic decision-making. Discarded data from the platform. Rejected proposals from the participatory budgeting process. Resentment lingering over voting results and any other ‘democratic’ decisions. All of these cuts present opportunities for different ways of thinking and doing democracy. Opportunities for making collective stories, claims and struggles to undo decisions that are set in stone. Opportunities for turning challenges – from technical glitches to political polarisation – into alternative and democratic futures. In Liquid Democracy, I’ve showcased how local communities in Taipei, Helsinki and Madrid reworked ‘cuts’ into regulations or decision-making.
Liquid worlds remain relevant for exploring democracy-to-come, especially in the worlds of AI. They allow us to escape the trap of thinking about the future in either dystopian or utopian terms. Liquid democracy highlights the importance of the (different) liquid worlds in understanding AI for democracy precisely with its sticky problems: power dynamics, oppressions and authoritarianism. When democracy is approached from the liquid worlds, we see more clearly in terms of what AI can do for democracy. If AI is to benefit democracy, its decisions must consider democratic challenges – such as political polarisation – are changeable in order to rework them into opportunities. What AI can do here, then, is to identify and visualise, in new ways, that different, sometimes polarised opinions have more in common than they appear to have. And this is just the first step. Democratic decisions should consider the ideas and sentiments that are dissolvable in bridging divisions. With liquid worlds in mind, we can envisage how the new AI-powered DDP such as Suffrago and London Voice in the UK can harness AI’s capability to enable humans to find and forge productive connections across differences that might otherwise be impossible.
About the author: Yu-Shan Tseng is Anniversary Research Fellow in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton. Her work has focused on the entanglements between digital platforms, cities and democracy.
Suggested further reading
Tseng, Y.-S. (2025) Liquid Democracy: A comparative study of digital urban democracy. Available to purchase from: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Liquid+Democracy%3A+A+Comparative+Study+of+Digital+Urban+Democracy-p-9781394180424
Webber, S., Maalsen, S. & Emmanuel, L. (2024) Tracking, calculating, watching: Governing and delay in the Jakarta Smart City. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12630
Yeo, S.J.I. (2024) Negotiating digital urban futures: The limits and possibilities of future-making in Singapore. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12632
How to cite
Tseng, Y.-S. (2025, April) Liquid democracy: rethinking democracy through its fluidity. Geography Directions. https://doi.org/10.55203/DZKD7803
Geography Directions 