Anna Marie Jansen

Liquid Democracy: Counteracting Democratic Deficits in German Politics Anna Marie Jansen

Protests such as the Occupy Movement in America and Stuttgart21 in Germany show that citizens want to have a bigger role in how important political matters are decided. Ideally, decision making processes that concern all people should also be decided by the people. The current model of representative democracy in Germany does not allow for too much involvement and participation by non-politicians and ordinary citizens. On the other side, people get more and more disillusioned by politics and are not interested in political matters. Is this because they do not get the chance to participate the way they want to? Liquid democracy is a model of democracy that combines representative and direct democracy and tries to even out the difficulties in both models. Taking the opportunities of information and communication technologies to give everybody a chance to take part in politics, the model tries to counteract democratic deficits in German politics.