Transitive proxy voting (or "liquid democracy") is a novel form of collective decision making, often framed as an attractive hybrid of direct and representative democracy. Although the ideas behind liquid democracy have garnered widespread support, there have been relatively few attempts to model it formally. This paper makes three main contributions. First, it proposes a new social choice-theoretic model of liquid democracy, which is distinguished by taking a richer formal perspective on the process by which a voter chooses a proxy. Second, it examines the model from an axiomatic perspective, proving (a) a proxy vote analogue of May's Theorem and (b) an impossibility result concerning monotonicity properties in a proxy vote setting. Third, it explores the topic of manipulation in transitive proxy votes. Two forms of manipulation specific to the proxy vote setting are defined, and it is shown that manipulation occurs in strictly more cases in proxy votes than in classical votes.

翻译：传递式代理投票（或称“液态民主”）是一种新颖的集体决策形式，常被视为直接民主与代议制民主的吸引人之混合体。尽管液态民主背后的理念已获得广泛支持，但对其进行形式化建模的尝试仍相对较少。本文有三项主要贡献：首先，提出了一个液态民主的新社会选择理论模型，其独特之处在于对选民选择代理人的过程采取了更丰富的形式化视角；其次，从公理化角度审视该模型，证明了 (a) 代理投票情境下梅定理的类比命题，以及 (b) 关于代理投票中单调性性质的一个不可能性结果；第三，探讨了传递式代理投票中的操纵问题，定义了两种代理投票情境特有的操纵形式，并证明了代理投票中发生操纵的严格多于经典投票中的情况。