The German Pirate Party had a system called "liquid democracy" which allowed you to vote yourself, or revocably delegate your vote to others. Interesting idea. IIRC it didn't work.
IMHO, continuous referendums are a mindblowing idea... mindblowingly bad. Politics, like any other skilled job, requires commitment and expertise. The "wisdom of crowds" is not a substitute: while it may aggregate information successfully, it cannot create information. For example, figuring out Putin's intentions, or doing a cost-benefit analysis of TTIP, is difficult and time-consuming. If nobody has the incentives and responsibility to do that, it will not get done: political expertise will be a public good, and will be undersupplied for the standard reasons. Representative democracy leads to candidates and parties who have reasonably strong incentives to demonstrate their competence. Direct democracy does not.
Noone knows if it would have worked, because they never implemented it (except for some local levels).
There was much party-internal warfare about it.
One faction saw Liquid Democracy as the solution to all problems.
The other faction insisted on "Datenschutz" (privacy extreme), which to them evidently meant that having your real identity tied to any election is unacceptable. They would rather have people vote twice or three hundred times on the same ballot than introduce any kind of identifier.
It's a great demonstration of why the German Pirate Party doesn't even get enough votes anymore to have the listed by name in TV when election results come in.
IMHO, continuous referendums are a mindblowing idea... mindblowingly bad. Politics, like any other skilled job, requires commitment and expertise. The "wisdom of crowds" is not a substitute: while it may aggregate information successfully, it cannot create information. For example, figuring out Putin's intentions, or doing a cost-benefit analysis of TTIP, is difficult and time-consuming. If nobody has the incentives and responsibility to do that, it will not get done: political expertise will be a public good, and will be undersupplied for the standard reasons. Representative democracy leads to candidates and parties who have reasonably strong incentives to demonstrate their competence. Direct democracy does not.