Ykhjuy

In one of his articles/books, Yuval-Noah-Harari argues that liberal democracy might be obsolete if human agency is greatly reduced by technology:

Information technology is continuing to leap forward; biotechnology is
beginning to provide a window into our inner lives—our emotions,
thoughts, and choices. Together, infotech and biotech will create
unprecedented upheavals in human society, eroding human agency and,
possibly, subverting human desires. Under such conditions, liberal
democracy and free-market economics might become obsolete.

If I understand correctly human agency is closely related to free-will:

(..) human agency is subtly distinct from the concept of free will, the philosophical doctrine that our choices are not the product of causal chains, but are significantly free or undetermined.

However, I do not understand why liberal democracy is in peril if human agency is reduced. By ensuring free elections humans, the result should theoretically reflect the votes of all people regardless of the amount of "agency" involved.

Is there a political theory that connects liberal democracy to the concept of "free-will"?

Question: Does liberal democracy require a significant amount of free-will in order to function?

I disagree with the assumption of the article that technology takes away our free agency. I think that technology provides more avenues for our free agency and many (maybe too many) ways to express our opinions and desires. It certainly gives us more time to think about how our lives could be better and compare ourselves to others who may have more or less we do.

I would agree with the assumption stated above that democracy does require free agency or free will. If humans had no individual free will or agency then there would be no need to express an opinion and no need to mediate conflicts because government could be an automated system that we would make requests to. We would then go about governing ourselves using algorithms programmed to certain situations. An example is the book, 1984 by George Orwell. Technology rules their lives and free-thinking is discouraged and persecuted.

As a sidebar, I think that the greater danger to democracy is not lack free agency, but lack of personal responsibility. Everyone paints him/herself a victim and blames others for his/her problems instead of taking ownership for the part that put him/her in that position. Lack of personal responsibility is, in my opinion, a greater danger to democracy today.

Democracy does not require free will because the existence of democracy does not prove the existence of free will. A set of computer programs could be programmed to execute choices through voting where they cast their votes based on their circumstances and then all honor the result. No one would argue the computer programs are not executing a decision through voting "democratically" or that the robots have "free will", so on its surface it seems that democracy does not require free will.

It is entirely possible that human beings don't have free will. In such a case we could still have democracy. However, if there was an understanding of the exact process that humans used to decide their vote, it would logically be potentially possible to cut out the middle man and put in place exactly what the people would have voted for anyway without them voting.

Another way that the lack of free will could challenge democracy would be if people's choices were purely the product of their environment or circumstance. If that was the case their environment or circumstance could be manipulated to coerce their voting behavior (we call this in everyday parlance "advertising"). In this case, again, it is possible that the democratic system is thus somewhat redundant to the process of simply convincing everyone to go along with things. As technology and understanding of psychology become better it is conceivable that there would exist methods that could be tailor made to convince each and every individual in society.

Whether this level of understanding of human decision making is likely is a different question, and whether the article's criticism of this potential circumstance is valid is also a different question.

Question: Does liberal democracy require a significant amount of free-will in order to function?

Yes. That is the entire point of democracy. You, the individual, is responsible for your own free-will. That free-will of yours establishes - and actively does democracy - in order to maintain your own individuality within that body politic; your liberty to express your free-will. You are responsible for your own part in maintaining the democracy and interaction with other humans that have formed the democracy. When an individual in a democracy defers their responsibility to another human or entity, they cease to exercise their own free-will and thereby place decrease their contribution to the body politic as a whole. Democracy is not static, the system of self-government requires individual action to sustain the entire commonwealth.

An ancient Chinese proverb is roughly that the functioning society is where the individual who encounters the tree on the road stops to move the tree off of the road, without looking around to see if their neighbor is watching them to gain social recognition. The tree is moved off of the road, without fanfare, for the continued functioning of the whole body politic. No recognition is required, the action is performed for the good of the whole. The context was not democracy, though the same principle applies within a democracy.

You are "free-will" and "liberal democracy".

Technology does not supplant free-will, or human agency. The human still has the choice to turn off the machine, or not use the machine at all.

The linked article makes astounding claims without substantiation

In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant.

which is a preposterous statement.

Later there is a section which discusses chess

Yet in recent years, computers have become so good at playing chess
that their human collaborators have lost their value and might soon
become entirely irrelevant.

which suggests that the human who made the machine might be supplanted by the machine itself, which is impossible, if only due to the fact that the machine requires a power source, and bug fixes. That is, if an individual decides to play chess with a machine rather than a human being, or invest time in creating AI for chess. Chess between two humans cannot be replaced by chess between a human and a machine, nor a machine and a machine, certainly not for humans who only play chess for a value. The machine has no article of value to place on the table, thus some humans might not ever play chess with a machine that is utterly valueless.

Even the most sophisticated technology might provide a false sense of security to some, but not all. And some never forget that technology can be overcome, with sufficient effort. One example of this is the EMV, or "chip" debit and credit cards, which were introduced into circulation across the planet for various reasons; including "security"; insurance arrangements between card processing companies and financial institutions; see You Might Have Gotten a New Credit Card With a New Chip Embedded in the Front — Here’s What You Need to Know About It; These two guys just hacked the chip card that was supposed to keep your credit card safe; EMV in a Nutshell; Cloning Credit Cards: A Combined Pre-play and Downgrade Attack on EMV Contactless
Increasing Security and Reducing Fraud with EMV Chip and PCI Standards;
specifications).

However, when faced with would-be impenetrable technology (does not exist) hardware or software, the attacker might sit, scratch their head, and then snap their fingers while simultaneously remembering that they do not need to spend $100K to build a clean room to get what they want; they can revert to bypassing the technology altogether, and deal with the base factor of all politics: the human element, which should provide a reference point for the limits of technology relevant to actual human political interaction