If one were to write the history of representation from an intersectional perspective, it would read as a veritable comedy of errors. A story, in short of inclusion and exclusion, privileging and marginalization, and of good, mis-, poor, and non-representation. No facet of politics is untouched by these dynamics – whether civil society or formal political participation, political recruitment and leadership, or policy and legislation (Siow Reference Siow2023).
Intersectional Representation Problematics
An anthologyFootnote
2 of women’s Intersectional Representation Problematics might go something like this:
Absence and Underrepresentation
In many parliaments, majority, minoritized, and marginalized women are either not present or are too few in number, relative to their percentage in the population. Elite, majority men are overrepresented everywhere (Hughes Reference Hughes2016). Women’s numbers are in many countries increasing, and in some parliaments, minority women are better represented descriptively than their men counterparts (Mügge et al. Reference Mügge, van der Pas and van de Wardt2019). Yet, any “complementarity advantage” – being a woman and an ethnic minority ticks two representational boxes – is premised upon on gendered assumptions about their lack of threat to old, elite, white men’s power.
Misrepresentation
There are some signs that minoritized women’s interests are in receipt of greater attention than in the past, but this is at the absolute margins (Siow Reference Siow2023). Some of this talk is undertaken by descriptive representatives but not all can or do so (Bajpai Reference Bajpai2019; and as we return to below). Most claims are mouthed by elite, majority men, and in an instrumentalized, essentialized, stigmatized, homogenized, selective, and stereotyped fashion (Siow Reference Siow2023; Joly and Wadia Reference Joly and Wadia2017). Talked about and over, heard but not listened to, and lacking institutionalized accountability, agency is restricted if not denied. With little material, cultural, and political capital, some women are “easy to ignore” because their very positionality places them far away from elite politicians. Even civil society activism privileges advantaged sub-group interests, which are universalized and predominate; disadvantaged women’s interests are excluded from the core demands of women’s civil society groups (Christoffersen and Emejulu Reference Christoffersen and Emejulu2023).
Institutional Neglect and Violence
Built for men, and privileging masculinity in racialized, classed, and other ways, parliaments reproduce representative relationships for the non-prototypical representatives marked by disconnect and distance (Hawkesworth Reference Hawkesworth2003). Trust, affinity, and belonging are felt disproportionately by elite and majority citizens (Hinojosa and Kittilson Reference Hinojosa and Kittilson2020). Absent an institutional obligation to represent groups, it is left to individual representatives who care. This is not without cost and requires additional labor (Harder Reference Harder2023), invites media representation that depicts them as “different and out of place” (Runderkamp et al. Reference Runderkamp, van der Pas, Schotel and Mügge2022), and subjects them to violence, as minoritized women experience disproportionate and/or differentiated harassment, abuse, and intimidation relative to majority women and minority men. Such normalized violence reduces what women might want to say and where they can speak, and limits audience reach. Ultimately, it renders women, especially marginalized and minoritized ones, less good representatives and less electorally viable candidates (Collignon et al. Reference Collignon and Rüdig2021).
Feminist Democratic Design
In a concerted attempt to address some of these intersectional challenges, we designed a new process of group representation, entitled feminist democratic representation. This approach offers an “intersectionally updated” design for parliamentary processes in which “differently affected” women, not least the most marginalized, are formally included and listened to. Elected representatives are moreover held to account for whether, during their deliberations and decision-making, they act in a responsive, inclusive, and egalitarian manner to the perspectives of women in all their ideological and intersectional diversity (Celis and Childs Reference Celis and Childs2020; Celis and Childs Reference Celis and Childs2023; Celis and Childs Reference Celis, Childs, Saward and Diehlforthcoming). However ambitious our intent, the redesigning and re-fashioning of parliaments can only ever be a partial answer to the representational problematics that play out across democracies, inter alia, additional sites of formal politics, civil society, women’s organizations, and the media.
Intersectional Representational Problematics are systemic — as the above anthology has laid bare — and thus require a comprehensive re-thinking of the ideals, principles, and practices of democracy. To this end, we make the case for politics and gender, as well as intersectional scholars, to engage in some serious feminist democratic design (FDD). FDD builds from Michael Saward’s 2021 book Democratic Design (DD), which asks the following question: “How might, or how should, democratic institutions and practices be organized and activated for a given time and place?” DD is a problem-driven methodology which identifies a range of democratic practices that solve democracies’ incomplete democratization and is “firmly focused on the systemic level” (Saward Reference Saward2021, 109). Yet, without refracting this methodology through a feminist lens, democratic designers will be unable to meet the Intersectional Representational Problematics characteristic of contemporary politics. FDD consists of three iterative phases: design thinking, designing, and building.
Design Thinking
When designers imagine democracy as it should be, core democratic ideals, principles, and practices are reconsidered. A re-reading of feminist, intersectionality, and democratic theories, and attending to activist political practices, forges an ideal intersectional, feminist democratic polity. This imagining redefines the conception of equality that is a foundational principle of any democratic design. Already included in Saward’s (Reference Saward2021, 56) “democratic minimum,” FDD shifts from a definition of equality of opportunity to a more structural, transformative conception. Formal equality of opportunity in unequal societies always fails to deliver for women, especially the most marginalized, and thus in FDD, it will not suffice. Complementing the democratic minimum is democratic sensibility, i.e., the ethos or orientation that must drive democratic design work. Here, FDD offers a second intersectional update. Democratic sensibility now requires the “fair consideration of the interests of, and respect for the agency of’ the differently affected, decentering the interests and agency of the dominant group” (Saward Reference Saward2021, 62-63).
Designing
When designers produce their designs, they choose and sequence democratic practices to realize preferred democratic principles (Saward Reference Saward2021, 81). This principle/practice “dual core” reflexively redresses the specific problems faced in a particular place and time (Saward Reference Saward2021, 54). In our context, democratic designers cannot but attend to the pervasive attacks on representative/liberal democracy and equalities. These are not so much separate, but newly entwined. Constructed as an elite project operating against the people, gender ideology and anti-feminism is the ground where anti-democratic, populists, and illiberals come together (Graff and Korolczuk Reference Graff and Korolczuk2022). This attack is not just on women and other marginalized groups (important though this is), but an attack on fundamental democratic values, spaces, and culture. In sum, the work of democratic designers cannot be divorced from this existential challenge to both democracy and equalities: what used to be considered a minority or partial concern is now, more than ever, a democratic essential.
What practices would an intersectional feminist design include and exclude? Eschewing the forced choice between different “models of democracy,” democratic designers mix and match amongst established, hybrid, and new democratic practices (Saward Reference Saward2021, 34). There are plenty of practices available, including fashionable innovations already claiming to further democracy, such as citizens assemblies. To be included on a FDD “menu” of approved democratic practices, an “intersectionality test” must be passed: all must reduce inequality and injustice and maximize equality for the differently affected. The FDD menu would further benefit from additional innovations: novel practices crafted through the imagining of ideal intersectional feminist democratic politics.
Who designs in FDD and how should they “do” their design work? FDD depends on coalitions of designers and designing processes that are themselves intersectionally fair and just (Lowndes and Roberts Reference Lowndes and Roberts2013). Exclusive/inclusive coalition composition and approaches should be responsive to the specificities of each location, but the commitment to intersectional fairness and justice rules out the heroic, patriarchal, and/or colonial designer. And, when determining the “scale and ambition of the design, along feasible/infeasible and radical/incremental axes” (Saward Reference Saward2021, 123), FDD coalitions must do so with intersectional perspectives foregrounded. What counts as “radical” and/or “infeasible” from the perspective of the status quo might be considered the bare minimum from the perspective of minoritized and marginalized groups.
Building
FDD conceives of this third stage as inseparable from design thinking and designing. Plans on paper do not in themselves change anything, whereas the intersectional feminist imperative is to make democracy better for women in their diversity in the here and now. When designers build, they are trialing and revising their new designs in situ; the ongoing work of the democratic design coalition becomes investigating the efficacy of their design. Evaluative standards for new designs on the ground include the extent to which they deliver democratic effects for all women, inter alia inclusion, trust, recognition, connection, mobilization, responsiveness, and accountability. As designs are trialed and revised, mechanisms are necessary for women in wider society to formally judge the quality of their participation and representation – a “feeding back” to inform the design coalition’s ongoing designing and building work.
Building in contexts of gendered de-democratization place an additional task on the FDD coalition: to respond to the almost inevitable resistance and backlash they “invite.” Developing counterstrategies becomes, then, central to developing the “best” design for a particular place and time. These counterstrategies will likely need to go beyond refining or replacing particular democratic practices and involve other protective strategies. Against political violence, for example, new criminal laws and additional resources might be needed to reduce occurrence and punish perpetrators, suggesting not unproblematically in the former case, a more carceral approach. Similarly, greater regulation of media representations might well be necessary, begging questions of free speech.
“Thinking Big” About Feminist Democracy
Politics, intersectionality, and gender scholars need to know significantly more about how established and innovative democratic practices and devices can redress inequality, and how they can be implemented on the ground, especially in our contemporary times characterized by polarization and de-democratization. Across the three phases of FDD, democratic designers will benefit from traversing the academic-practitioner divide, engaging in novel conversations between academic disciplines and subfields and real-world actors. Codesign by academics, practitioners, and civil society actors is the way to go, with new designs centering the knowledge, experiences, and perspectives of those currently at the margins. In sum, we need some “big thinking” about democracy, feminism, and intersectionality — a more creative imagining of what democracy might be and how it can be brought to life.
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If one were to write the history of representation from an intersectional perspective, it would read as a veritable comedy of errors. A story, in short of inclusion and exclusion, privileging and marginalization, and of good, mis-, poor, and non-representation. No facet of politics is untouched by these dynamics – whether civil society or formal political participation, political recruitment and leadership, or policy and legislation (Siow Reference Siow2023).
Intersectional Representation Problematics
An anthologyFootnote 2 of women’s Intersectional Representation Problematics might go something like this:
Absence and Underrepresentation
In many parliaments, majority, minoritized, and marginalized women are either not present or are too few in number, relative to their percentage in the population. Elite, majority men are overrepresented everywhere (Hughes Reference Hughes2016). Women’s numbers are in many countries increasing, and in some parliaments, minority women are better represented descriptively than their men counterparts (Mügge et al. Reference Mügge, van der Pas and van de Wardt2019). Yet, any “complementarity advantage” – being a woman and an ethnic minority ticks two representational boxes – is premised upon on gendered assumptions about their lack of threat to old, elite, white men’s power.
Misrepresentation
There are some signs that minoritized women’s interests are in receipt of greater attention than in the past, but this is at the absolute margins (Siow Reference Siow2023). Some of this talk is undertaken by descriptive representatives but not all can or do so (Bajpai Reference Bajpai2019; and as we return to below). Most claims are mouthed by elite, majority men, and in an instrumentalized, essentialized, stigmatized, homogenized, selective, and stereotyped fashion (Siow Reference Siow2023; Joly and Wadia Reference Joly and Wadia2017). Talked about and over, heard but not listened to, and lacking institutionalized accountability, agency is restricted if not denied. With little material, cultural, and political capital, some women are “easy to ignore” because their very positionality places them far away from elite politicians. Even civil society activism privileges advantaged sub-group interests, which are universalized and predominate; disadvantaged women’s interests are excluded from the core demands of women’s civil society groups (Christoffersen and Emejulu Reference Christoffersen and Emejulu2023).
Institutional Neglect and Violence
Built for men, and privileging masculinity in racialized, classed, and other ways, parliaments reproduce representative relationships for the non-prototypical representatives marked by disconnect and distance (Hawkesworth Reference Hawkesworth2003). Trust, affinity, and belonging are felt disproportionately by elite and majority citizens (Hinojosa and Kittilson Reference Hinojosa and Kittilson2020). Absent an institutional obligation to represent groups, it is left to individual representatives who care. This is not without cost and requires additional labor (Harder Reference Harder2023), invites media representation that depicts them as “different and out of place” (Runderkamp et al. Reference Runderkamp, van der Pas, Schotel and Mügge2022), and subjects them to violence, as minoritized women experience disproportionate and/or differentiated harassment, abuse, and intimidation relative to majority women and minority men. Such normalized violence reduces what women might want to say and where they can speak, and limits audience reach. Ultimately, it renders women, especially marginalized and minoritized ones, less good representatives and less electorally viable candidates (Collignon et al. Reference Collignon and Rüdig2021).
Feminist Democratic Design
In a concerted attempt to address some of these intersectional challenges, we designed a new process of group representation, entitled feminist democratic representation. This approach offers an “intersectionally updated” design for parliamentary processes in which “differently affected” women, not least the most marginalized, are formally included and listened to. Elected representatives are moreover held to account for whether, during their deliberations and decision-making, they act in a responsive, inclusive, and egalitarian manner to the perspectives of women in all their ideological and intersectional diversity (Celis and Childs Reference Celis and Childs2020; Celis and Childs Reference Celis and Childs2023; Celis and Childs Reference Celis, Childs, Saward and Diehlforthcoming). However ambitious our intent, the redesigning and re-fashioning of parliaments can only ever be a partial answer to the representational problematics that play out across democracies, inter alia, additional sites of formal politics, civil society, women’s organizations, and the media.
Intersectional Representational Problematics are systemic — as the above anthology has laid bare — and thus require a comprehensive re-thinking of the ideals, principles, and practices of democracy. To this end, we make the case for politics and gender, as well as intersectional scholars, to engage in some serious feminist democratic design (FDD). FDD builds from Michael Saward’s 2021 book Democratic Design (DD), which asks the following question: “How might, or how should, democratic institutions and practices be organized and activated for a given time and place?” DD is a problem-driven methodology which identifies a range of democratic practices that solve democracies’ incomplete democratization and is “firmly focused on the systemic level” (Saward Reference Saward2021, 109). Yet, without refracting this methodology through a feminist lens, democratic designers will be unable to meet the Intersectional Representational Problematics characteristic of contemporary politics. FDD consists of three iterative phases: design thinking, designing, and building.
Design Thinking
When designers imagine democracy as it should be, core democratic ideals, principles, and practices are reconsidered. A re-reading of feminist, intersectionality, and democratic theories, and attending to activist political practices, forges an ideal intersectional, feminist democratic polity. This imagining redefines the conception of equality that is a foundational principle of any democratic design. Already included in Saward’s (Reference Saward2021, 56) “democratic minimum,” FDD shifts from a definition of equality of opportunity to a more structural, transformative conception. Formal equality of opportunity in unequal societies always fails to deliver for women, especially the most marginalized, and thus in FDD, it will not suffice. Complementing the democratic minimum is democratic sensibility, i.e., the ethos or orientation that must drive democratic design work. Here, FDD offers a second intersectional update. Democratic sensibility now requires the “fair consideration of the interests of, and respect for the agency of’ the differently affected, decentering the interests and agency of the dominant group” (Saward Reference Saward2021, 62-63).
Designing
When designers produce their designs, they choose and sequence democratic practices to realize preferred democratic principles (Saward Reference Saward2021, 81). This principle/practice “dual core” reflexively redresses the specific problems faced in a particular place and time (Saward Reference Saward2021, 54). In our context, democratic designers cannot but attend to the pervasive attacks on representative/liberal democracy and equalities. These are not so much separate, but newly entwined. Constructed as an elite project operating against the people, gender ideology and anti-feminism is the ground where anti-democratic, populists, and illiberals come together (Graff and Korolczuk Reference Graff and Korolczuk2022). This attack is not just on women and other marginalized groups (important though this is), but an attack on fundamental democratic values, spaces, and culture. In sum, the work of democratic designers cannot be divorced from this existential challenge to both democracy and equalities: what used to be considered a minority or partial concern is now, more than ever, a democratic essential.
What practices would an intersectional feminist design include and exclude? Eschewing the forced choice between different “models of democracy,” democratic designers mix and match amongst established, hybrid, and new democratic practices (Saward Reference Saward2021, 34). There are plenty of practices available, including fashionable innovations already claiming to further democracy, such as citizens assemblies. To be included on a FDD “menu” of approved democratic practices, an “intersectionality test” must be passed: all must reduce inequality and injustice and maximize equality for the differently affected. The FDD menu would further benefit from additional innovations: novel practices crafted through the imagining of ideal intersectional feminist democratic politics.
Who designs in FDD and how should they “do” their design work? FDD depends on coalitions of designers and designing processes that are themselves intersectionally fair and just (Lowndes and Roberts Reference Lowndes and Roberts2013). Exclusive/inclusive coalition composition and approaches should be responsive to the specificities of each location, but the commitment to intersectional fairness and justice rules out the heroic, patriarchal, and/or colonial designer. And, when determining the “scale and ambition of the design, along feasible/infeasible and radical/incremental axes” (Saward Reference Saward2021, 123), FDD coalitions must do so with intersectional perspectives foregrounded. What counts as “radical” and/or “infeasible” from the perspective of the status quo might be considered the bare minimum from the perspective of minoritized and marginalized groups.
Building
FDD conceives of this third stage as inseparable from design thinking and designing. Plans on paper do not in themselves change anything, whereas the intersectional feminist imperative is to make democracy better for women in their diversity in the here and now. When designers build, they are trialing and revising their new designs in situ; the ongoing work of the democratic design coalition becomes investigating the efficacy of their design. Evaluative standards for new designs on the ground include the extent to which they deliver democratic effects for all women, inter alia inclusion, trust, recognition, connection, mobilization, responsiveness, and accountability. As designs are trialed and revised, mechanisms are necessary for women in wider society to formally judge the quality of their participation and representation – a “feeding back” to inform the design coalition’s ongoing designing and building work.
Building in contexts of gendered de-democratization place an additional task on the FDD coalition: to respond to the almost inevitable resistance and backlash they “invite.” Developing counterstrategies becomes, then, central to developing the “best” design for a particular place and time. These counterstrategies will likely need to go beyond refining or replacing particular democratic practices and involve other protective strategies. Against political violence, for example, new criminal laws and additional resources might be needed to reduce occurrence and punish perpetrators, suggesting not unproblematically in the former case, a more carceral approach. Similarly, greater regulation of media representations might well be necessary, begging questions of free speech.
“Thinking Big” About Feminist Democracy
Politics, intersectionality, and gender scholars need to know significantly more about how established and innovative democratic practices and devices can redress inequality, and how they can be implemented on the ground, especially in our contemporary times characterized by polarization and de-democratization. Across the three phases of FDD, democratic designers will benefit from traversing the academic-practitioner divide, engaging in novel conversations between academic disciplines and subfields and real-world actors. Codesign by academics, practitioners, and civil society actors is the way to go, with new designs centering the knowledge, experiences, and perspectives of those currently at the margins. In sum, we need some “big thinking” about democracy, feminism, and intersectionality — a more creative imagining of what democracy might be and how it can be brought to life.