The design rewards commitment: lock for four years and receive full voting weight, lock for one and receive a quarter, with the weight decaying as the lock runs down. The aim is to hand control to people who cannot leave quickly.
It also creates a market in influence. Where votes direct emissions to particular pools, other protocols openly bribe vote holders to point rewards at them, and an entire layer of vote-buying markets has grown around it. That is transparent rent extraction rather than corruption, but it is what the mechanism produces.
For a holder the trade is stark: illiquidity for yield and influence. A four-year lock cannot be undone if the protocol declines, the token falls, or you simply change your mind, and secondary markets for locked positions trade at a discount when they exist at all.
Related: governance-token, governance-quorum, dao, liquidity-mining