Women’s Good Political Representation

Abstract

In this 'state of the art' mapping the major contours of three decades of politics and gender analysis, Celis and Childs re-make the case for women's group representation. Drawing on their recent book, Feminist Democratic Representation (2020), they call for rejecting traditional disaggregated conceptions of representation derived from Hanna Pitkin (1967) in favour of a procedural-plus approach. They hold that formal representational processes can and must accommodate women and do so in ways that take intersectionality seriously. Indeed, some three decades on from the publication of key presence theories -by Anne Phillips, Jane Mansbridge, and Melissa Williams -Celis and Childs urge politics and gender scholars to engage with recent work on democratic design as a means to re-design and re-build representative democracy 'for' women. In the face of women's ongoing poverty of representation, feminist democratic design's centering of equality has the potential to realize the good representation of all women, in their ideological and intersectional diversity, in and through electoral politics.