Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Gerber, Alan

Abstract

One of the oldest questions in human society is: What kind of government works best, and why? To date, studying the effects of governance design decisions has been empirically difficult. This dissertation addresses this challenge by examining decentralized governance in blockchain-based technology platforms, where decision-making power is distributed among users who collectively cast votes. These digital communities provide a unique laboratory for democracy research as they rapidly iterate on their institutional structures, experimenting with both traditional and novel governance strategies while confronting classic representation and accountability challenges. The blockchain context offers two crucial advantages for studying democratic processes, namely the flexibility to experiment with different institutional designs, and access to granular data on political outcomes. This dissertation leverages these advantages through three interconnected studies that examine participation incentives, deliberative processes, and voter mobilization in a large online decentralized governance system. Chapter 1 introduces the setting for the subsequent empirical chapters, providing an overview of decentralized online governance, a description of the specific platform Optimism under study in this paper, and presenting survey results describing the population of governance participants. The survey responses, from approximately 150 active governance stakeholders, paint a picture of a global governance community that generally feels more empowered through online governance participation than in local or national governance, seeing themselves as part of an innovative form of democratic decision-making. Respondents also tend to value the transparency and global inclusion of Optimism governance, while still recognizing areas for improvement in decentralization and accessibility. Chapter 2 presents a large-scale quasi-experiment involving over 1.2 million user addresses to investigate how economic incentives affect democratic participation (forthcoming in Political Science Research and Methods). Focusing on the Optimism platform's distribution of digital tokens worth approximately $28 million USD to over 300,000 active participants, I find that reward schemes that give people a durable stake in the community and promise a sequence of future rewards significantly broaden participation in online democracy. The effects are particularly pronounced for smaller token holders and lead to more diversified voting patterns, suggesting potential pathways to more inclusive governance. Chapter 3 examines the impact of deliberation through a randomized experiment among governance stakeholders (n=132) in a decentralized system. While participants exhibit significant pre/post gains in efficacy and trust, the Complier Average Causal Effect (CACE) reveals more modest effects when accounting for treatment compliance, with positive though statistically imprecise effects. This study is the first of its kind in online decentralized governance and paves the way for future research on the role of deliberation in novel governance settings where the deliberative output has direct policy implications for the broader governance system. Chapter 4 reports the first major voter mobilization experiment in blockchain-based governance, testing messaging strategies on a sample of 34,328 online governance representatives over three voting cycles. The results demonstrate that email notifications, particularly those appealing to economic self-interest or collective security, significantly increase turnout by 1.5-2 percentage points (intention-to-treat) and 10-15 percentage points among email openers (CACE). Visual enhancements and repeated reminders approximately doubled these effects, highlighting how traditional get-out-the-vote strategies can be effectively adapted to online participation contexts. Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation, summarizing the key takeaways from the empirical chapters and discussing the implications for practice and for future research.Together, these chapters make substantive contributions to our scholarly understanding of governance and human behavior. In addition, this dissertation charts a new path for understanding incentives and participation in the online governance of tech platforms, which is itself an important topic in our ever-digitizing society.

Download

Share

COinS