Proportional Influence
Proportional Influence (also known as Domain-Based Governance) is the governance framework of the Sanctuary Protocol, replacing general elections with domain-specific participation where voice is proportional to proximity to the decision.
The Expertise Problem
Lawyers shouldn't build roads.
This sounds obvious, but modern democracies routinely assign lawyers, marketers, and career politicians to make decisions about infrastructure, climate science, healthcare, and education. Generalist legislators vote on specialist problems they don't understand.
The result: buildings that ignore physics, policies that ignore psychology, budgets that ignore mathematics.
Core Principle
Only those proximate to a decision—through expertise, geography, or direct impact—have voice in that decision.
Example: Building a Highway
| Participant | Role |
|---|---|
| Civil engineers | Assess structural requirements |
| Environmental scientists | Evaluate ecosystem impact |
| Local residents | Vote on route and noise mitigation |
| Regular commuters | Weigh in on traffic patterns |
Example: Setting Drug Policy
| Participant | Role |
|---|---|
| Pharmacologists | Assess biochemistry |
| Former users | Contribute lived experience |
| Healthcare workers | Describe clinical reality |
| Affected families | Share impact data |
Example: Designing School Curriculum
| Participant | Role |
|---|---|
| Educators | Propose pedagogical approaches |
| Students | Evaluate engagement |
| Parents | Assess home-school integration |
| Employers | Signal skill relevance |
No single politician pretends to understand all of these. No party platform bundles unrelated issues into false dichotomies.
How Proximity Works
The token trust graph determines influence in each domain:
Geographic Proximity
You have more voice in decisions affecting your neighborhood than distant regions. The person living next to a proposed development gets more weight than someone across the country.
Experiential Proximity
Someone who has been incarcerated has voice in prison policy that a judge doesn't. A nurse has voice in hospital staffing that an administrator lacks. Lived experience is a qualification.
Professional Proximity
Engineers have voice in engineering decisions. Scientists in scientific questions. But this isn't technocracy—professionals don't decide alone. They contribute expertise to deliberation where affected parties also participate.
Relational Proximity
Your vouch network connects you to domains through the people you know. If you've vouched for teachers, your voice carries in education discussions. Your relationships reveal your stakes.
No All-Purpose Authority
Under the token system:
- No one governs everything
- No one is governed in everything
- Authority is always bounded by domain
This eliminates:
- Career politicians who accumulate power across all areas
- Party discipline that forces votes against judgment
- Lobbyists who buy access to generalist decision-makers
- Electoral cycles that prioritize performance over competence
Weighted Deliberation
Not all voices are equal in every context. Weighting factors:
| Weight Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Expertise Weight | Verified credentials and demonstrated knowledge increase weight in relevant domains |
| Stake Weight | Those who bear consequences have more voice than those who don't. Future generations, represented through advocates, have standing |
| Diversity Weight | Deliberations that include diverse perspectives receive legitimacy bonuses. Homogeneous decisions face higher scrutiny |
| Skin-in-Game Weight | Proposals from people who will live with consequences carry more weight than proposals from those who can exit |
Scaling
Nested Domains
Decisions cascade from local to regional to national only when necessary. Most governance stays local.
Expertise Networks
Professionals self-organize into advisory networks that can be queried across jurisdictions.
Algorithmic Aggregation
Trust graphs compute influence weights automatically. No manual vote counting.
Transparency
All weights and calculations are public. Anyone can audit why a decision went a certain way.
What Politicians Become
Under domain governance, the role of "politician" transforms:
From: Professional representatives who make decisions for constituents
To: Facilitators who convene domain-relevant participants and ensure process integrity
They become procedural stewards, not power accumulators. Their job is to run good meetings, not to accumulate personal influence.
Precedents
| System | Description |
|---|---|
| Citizen Assemblies | Ireland used randomly selected citizens to deliberate on abortion and marriage equality. Results were more progressive than politicians would have produced. |
| Liquid Democracy | Pirate Parties experimented with delegable proxy voting—you can delegate your vote to someone more knowledgeable on specific issues. |
| Quadratic Voting | Economic mechanism where voting power scales with stake, preventing concentrated influence. |
| Indigenous Consensus | Many traditional governance systems required consultation with all affected parties, not majority rule. |
The Accountability Question
Who's responsible when domain-based decisions fail?
The vouch network. If the engineers who advised on a bridge that collapses were vouched for by others who should have known their competence, the network faces scrutiny.
Responsibility flows through relationships, not through abstract offices. This makes accountability personal without making it punitive.