Governance Participation in Token-Weighted Voting: Evidence from Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

This paper studies governance participation in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) to evaluate whether participation insights from corporate governance extend to token-weighted, decentralized voting systems. Using proposal-level data from 1,959 governance proposals across five major DAOs between July 2022 and December 2024, we examine two distinct dimensions of participation: voting-power mobilization and participation breadth. We test whether marginal procedural design features—specifically voting-window duration—affect participation once institutional identity is controlled for.

Across linear and count-data specifications, voting-window duration has no statistically or economically meaningful association with either participation measure. In contrast, persistent DAO-level differences explain the vast majority of participation variation, indicating that persistent DAO-level heterogeneity accounts for substantially more variation in participation than marginal differences in voting-window duration. We further document dynamic participation patterns: later proposals mobilize greater voting power without expanding the participating electorate.

By exploiting the transparency and proposal-level granularity of DAO governance (Yermack, 2017), this study directly observes participation patterns that are typically inferred in shareholder voting. The findings reinforce a central insight of corporate governance theory: participation is more closely associated with institutional identity than with marginal differences in voting window duration.