Constitutional Consensus for Democratic Governance
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866908836948869120 |
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| author | Keidar, Idit Lewis-Pye, Andrew Shapiro, Ehud Talmon, Nimrod |
| author_facet | Keidar, Idit Lewis-Pye, Andrew Shapiro, Ehud Talmon, Nimrod |
| contents | Permissionless-consensus-based Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are the prevailing paradigm for participant-governed digital organisations. As participants have verified resources but no trusted identities, this ecosystem is necessarily plutocratic (one coin -- one vote). Here we offer, for the first time, a democratic (one person -- one vote) paradigm for the governance of digital communities and organisations, based on permissioned consensus and egalitarian decision processes.
In line with Lamport's vision of consensus as a self-governing parliament, in the democratic paradigm a constitution specifies both a decision making protocol as well as a consensus protocol, combined to let participants amend the constitution through constitutionally-valid decisions that are ratified by consensus. To meaningfully instantiate this paradigm we integrate the disciplines of distributed computing and computational social choice, with the goal of providing a practical and efficient smartphone-based solution for the democratic self-governance of grassroots sovereign digital communities and organisations.
The resulting Constitutional Consensus protocol employs (1) state-of-the-art Sybil-resilient democratic decision processes for amending the set of participants, supermajority threshold, and timeout; and (2) a novel Byzantine-fault tolerant consensus protocol that is DAG-based (following Cordial Miners) thus eschewing reliable broadcast, with dual-mode operation (following Morpheus) that is quiescent when idle, has spontaneous leaders for isolated transactions, and formal round-robin leadership during high throughput. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19216 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Constitutional Consensus for Democratic Governance Keidar, Idit Lewis-Pye, Andrew Shapiro, Ehud Talmon, Nimrod Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Cryptography and Security Data Structures and Algorithms Networking and Internet Architecture Permissionless-consensus-based Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are the prevailing paradigm for participant-governed digital organisations. As participants have verified resources but no trusted identities, this ecosystem is necessarily plutocratic (one coin -- one vote). Here we offer, for the first time, a democratic (one person -- one vote) paradigm for the governance of digital communities and organisations, based on permissioned consensus and egalitarian decision processes. In line with Lamport's vision of consensus as a self-governing parliament, in the democratic paradigm a constitution specifies both a decision making protocol as well as a consensus protocol, combined to let participants amend the constitution through constitutionally-valid decisions that are ratified by consensus. To meaningfully instantiate this paradigm we integrate the disciplines of distributed computing and computational social choice, with the goal of providing a practical and efficient smartphone-based solution for the democratic self-governance of grassroots sovereign digital communities and organisations. The resulting Constitutional Consensus protocol employs (1) state-of-the-art Sybil-resilient democratic decision processes for amending the set of participants, supermajority threshold, and timeout; and (2) a novel Byzantine-fault tolerant consensus protocol that is DAG-based (following Cordial Miners) thus eschewing reliable broadcast, with dual-mode operation (following Morpheus) that is quiescent when idle, has spontaneous leaders for isolated transactions, and formal round-robin leadership during high throughput. |
| title | Constitutional Consensus for Democratic Governance |
| topic | Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Cryptography and Security Data Structures and Algorithms Networking and Internet Architecture |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19216 |