Equality and diversity in democracy: how can we democratize inclusively?

Abstract

Abstract. This essay explores how developing more complex analyses of power and politics sheds light on important themes for both intersectionality and participatory democracy. First of all, drawn from intersectional inquiry, the article outlines three focal points of a power analytic: how analyses of intersecting, structural oppressions underpin systems of domination; how a domains-of-power framework provides a set of conceptual tools for analyzing and responding to intersecting power relations; and how a more robust analysis of the collective illuminates the political action of subordinated groups. From this power analytic, the essay examines power and politics from the standpoint of the resistance traditions of historically subordinated groups, especially African American women´s political action. Finally, the article discusses implications of intersectionality's power analytic for projects for intersectionality and participatory democracy. Related to this, intersectionality conceptualization from Black feminism in flexible, pragmatic terms constitutes an important site for seeing the deepening commitment to participatory democracy as an alternative to technical agendas of the state. Keywords: Black feminism; Intersectionality; Participatory democracy; Power; Resistance.[es] La diferencia que crea el poder: interseccionalidad y profundización democrática Resumen. Este ensayo explora cómo desarrollar de manera más compleja un análisis de poder y políticas que arroje luz tanto sobre las cuestiones relativas a la interseccionalidad como a la profundización democrática. En primer lugar, y desde la investigación interseccional, el articulo esboza tres puntos centrales de un análisis de poder: cómo el análisis de la intersección de las opresiones estructurales sustenta los sistemas de dominación; cómo el framework de los dominios de poder aporta herramientas conceptuales para examinar y responder a relaciones de poder entrecruzadas, y cómo un análisis más robusto de lo colectivo ilumina la acción política de los grupos subordinados. Desde este análisis, el ensayo examina el poder y las políticas desde el punto de vista de las tradiciones de resistencia de los grupos subordinados históricamente, especialmente la acción política de las mujeres Afroamericanas. Por último, el artículo discute las implicaciones de un análisis de poder interseccional para proyectos de interseccionalidad y participación democrática. A este respecto, la conceptualización interseccional del feminismo Negro en términos flexibles y pragmáticos constituye un importante punto de partida para un compromiso más profundo con la democracia participativa como una alternativa a las agendas técnicas del estado.

Towards Intersectional Democratic Innovations

“…Application of this perspective, therefore, requires an ‘insider view’ of experiences that are characteristic of people at the particular intersection of identities in question. Within the democratic scholarship literature, Jone CMartínez-Palacios (2016) successfully applies this perspective and analyses the experiences of deaf Basque women with participatory and deliberative institutions. However, intersectional scholars have also argued in favour of applying intersectionality more broadly, as ‘a challenge [that] urges us to grapple with and overcome our entrenched perceptual-cognitive habits of essentialism, categorical purity, and segregation’ (Carastathis, 2016: 4).…”

Let the people decide: citizen deliberation on the role of GMOs in Mali’s agriculture

“…Moreover, the agendas of intersectional politics, antiracism, and decolonisation are rarely incorporated in the theory and practice of deliberative democracy and its politics of knowledge (Squires 2010;Martinez Palacios 2016). Uneven power relations persist, and continue to shape the minds, knowledge, and governance regimes of former colonial states (Ngugi 1986;Mignolo 2007;Mignolo and Walsh 2018;Fanon 2021).…”

Democratizing participation through feminism. The role of feminist subaltern counterpublics in the expansion of the Basque public sphere

“…Some authors have gone further and shown that this exclusion is related to the 1. The differences among democratizing via deliberation, via participation and via community development exist both in their genealogies and in the normative conditions respecting the legitimization of the outcome, product or decision (Martínez-Palacios, 2016). However, the fact that many participatory processes available are designed based on a hybridization of the three means that the most recent theory on democratic expansion uses, as this article does, the term "democratic innovation" to refer broadly to those participatory apparatuses that seek to extend at least four democratic goods: inclusion, popular control, citizens' ability to judge public decisions, and the transparency of decision-making processes (Fung and Wright, 2003;Smith, 2009).…”

“…Secondly, because their analysis allows an inductive, experience-based and sensitive approach to the structures of power (race, gender or class among others) that intersect in the oppression experienced by those who are excluded from DIs (Martínez-Palacios, 2016). Studying the forms adopted by counterpublics makes it possible to answer the two questions, "Why do some women decide to become counterpublic?"…”