Does Delegating Votes Protect Against Pandering Candidates?

The election of representatives in regular election cycles ostensibly prevents misbehavior by elected officials and keeps them accountable in service of the "will of the people." This democratic ideal can be undermined if candidates campaign dishonestly when seeking office over one or more election cycles or 'rounds'. We introduce a novel formal model of pandering, or strategic preference reporting by electoral candidates, and examine the resilience of two democratic voting systems to such pandering. The two voting systems we compare are Representative Democracy (RD) and Flexible Representative Democracy (FRD). For each voting system, our analysis centers on the types of strategies candidates employ and how voters update their views of candidates across rounds based on how the candidates have pandered in the past. We provide theoretical results on the complexity of pandering for a single round, formulate our problem for multiple rounds as a Markov Decision Process, and use reinforcement learning to study the effects of pandering by sets of candidates across a number of rounds.