Public confidence in democratic institutions has declined across many OECD countries over recent decades, while political participation and policy influence remain unevenly distributed across socioeconomic groups. Concurrently, democratic backsliding, declining electoral participation, and persistent concerns regarding institutional transparency and accountability have raised questions about whether existing governance structures are capable of sustaining broad-based legitimacy in complex modern societies. These developments motivate a central institutional design question: can governance systems be restructured to expand participation, improve transparency, and strengthen accountability without undermining stability or decision quality? This thesis proposes Programmable Participatory Governance (PPG), a formal governance framework designed to address these institutional deficits through the integration of democratic theory, institutional economics, and cryptographically verifiable distributed systems. PPG synthesises insights from deliberative and participatory democracy, collective action theory, direct democratic governance, and distributed computation to define a programmable architecture for transparent, verifiable, and scalable civic coordination. The framework is formally specified and evaluated through simulation and systems-oriented architectural analysis. The thesis examines how programmable governance mechanisms can support participatory decision-making while preserving procedural integrity, auditability, and institutional resilience under conditions of large-scale coordination. The objective is not to replace existing democratic institutions outright, but to explore how computationally mediated governance structures may augment or improve contemporary democratic processes in contexts where conventional institutions exhibit persistent structural limitations.

翻译：近几十年来，许多经合组织国家的公众对民主制度的信任度有所下降，而政治参与和政策影响力在不同社会经济群体间的分布仍然不均。与此同时，民主倒退、选举参与率下降，以及对制度透明度和问责制的持续担忧，引发了人们对现有治理结构在复杂现代社会中能否维持广泛合法性的疑问。这些发展催生了一个核心的制度设计问题：治理系统能否在不损害稳定性或决策质量的前提下，通过重组来扩大参与、提升透明度并加强问责制？本文提出可编程参与式治理（PPG），这是一个旨在通过融合民主理论、制度经济学和密码学可验证分布式系统来解决这些制度缺陷的形式化治理框架。PPG综合了审议民主与参与式民主、集体行动理论、直接民主治理以及分布式计算的洞见，定义了一个用于透明、可验证且可扩展的公民协调的可编程架构。该框架通过模拟和面向系统的架构分析进行了形式化规范与评估。本文探讨了可编程治理机制如何在支持参与式决策的同时，在大规模协调条件下保持程序完整性、可审计性和制度韧性。其目标并非全面取代现有民主制度，而是探索在传统制度表现出持续结构性局限的背景下，由计算中介的治理结构如何能够增强或改善当代民主进程。