Interest alignment between DAO delegations and token-holder preferences

Determine how well delegation choices in decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance reflect the underlying preferences and priorities of token holders, in order to assess the representativeness of delegated voting across protocols.

Background

Prior studies on DAO governance have highlighted concentration of voting power and trade-offs inherent to delegation but have not established whether delegations faithfully represent token holders’ preferences. The paper explicitly notes that this question remains open in existing literature.

To address this gap, the authors link on-chain behavior with off-chain governance forum discussions across 14 DAOs, using LLMs to extract voter interests and compare them against delegates’ behavior. This context motivates the need to determine the degree of alignment between delegators’ preferences and delegates’ actions to evaluate representativeness and fairness in DAO decision-making.