Cryptodemocratic Governance of Special Economic Zones

Special jurisdictions are testbeds for institutional experimentation that require voting mechanisms to make complex and evolving policy decisions. In this paper we explore how blockchain technology—as a new infrastructure for voting rights—might be applied in special jurisdictions. In a cryptodemocracy, voters are given property rights in their own votes that are recorded on decentralized blockchain ledgers (Allen et al. 2019). Votes in a cryptodemocracy can be given different bundles of property rights—such as the ability to delegate votes—that changes the structure of the democratic system. Our aim in this paper is to explore the underappreciated collective choice problems underpinning special jurisdictions, outline the potential for cryptodemocractic voting systems as new infrastructure for special jurisdictions, and propose a new interdisciplinary research program at the boundaries of institutional economics, political science, and innovation economics