Building Feminist Democratic Polities: The Potential of Democratic Design.

Abstract

Michael Saward, in his 2021 Award winning book, Democratic Design poses the following question: ‘how might, or how should, democratic institutions and practices be organized and activated for a given time and place?’ Democratic design (DD) is a problem-driven methodology to identify a range of democratic practices from across models of democracy – representative, deliberative, participatory - to redress incomplete democracies. Saward’s methodology prompts those concerned with the quality of democracy to ask ambitious questions about what, where, and how our democracies are incomplete, and to think creatively about what can and should be done. Politics and gender scholars have long been concerned with political equality and inclusion. With equality as part of its core, democratic design promises to produce better outcomes for historically excluded and/or marginalized groups. But how is equality conceived, operationalized, and realized and enacted as new democratic designs are thought about and built? It is time to begin new conversations disruptive of the silos of democratic theory, deliberative democratic practice, and feminist and other equality scholarship. Against the contemporary backdrop of the mushrooming of anti-equality and anti-democratic politics there are immediate, intrinsic and instrumental reasons for undertaking feminist democratic design thinking and building. This panel provides for a curated conversation on the potential for imagining and building feminist democratic polities through the adoption of a (feminist) democratic design methodology. Such feminist democratic polities would be marked by strong mutual relationships between diverse women and the institutions and processes of formal politics, and by new democratic relationships between women within civil society. Each of the participants brings a particular expertise to this conversation on democracy, political representation, intersectionality, and democratic innovations.

Title	Details
Inequality and Democracy. Feminist Democratic Design Thinking	View Paper Details
Democratic Co-Design: Lessons from the study of people in socio-economic difficult situations	View Paper Details
(Re)building representative relationships: the importance of ludic spaces	View Paper Details