Gender-based violence in political institutions: Dimensions of Theories of Democracy

Gender-based violence in political institutions threatens the rights, freedom, health and lives of the politicians concerned. At the same time, this phenomenon impairs democratic participation and is therefore a problem of theories of democracy (Krook 2017). Violence signals to incumbent politicians of non-hegemonic genders that they are not recognized as equals in the political field and suggests to potential candidates that their entry into this field comes at a high personal price. The proposed paper reflects this specific dimension of gender-based personal violence in politics. This has several interrelated aspects, including: • Violence as a pillar of androcentric 'normality': Gender-based violence raises the question which genders and which gender relations are accepted in the androcentric political field, and which are not. This also includes intersectional linkages between different dimensions of social inequality. • Violence as an effort to re-stabilize male sovereignty (Forster 2006): Violence can be understood as a reaction to the increasing visibility of women in top political positions. • Violence as a practice of submission: The exercise of violence in political institutions creates power relations among elected politicians who are formally equal. This challenges the fiction of a hierar-chy-free political public sphere as a conceptual pillar of liberal democracies. • Violence as message crime (Iganski 2014): Potential candidates are shown the personal price that is to be paid for active political participation. This may it render more difficult to recruit women, non-binary individuals and candidates with non-hegemonic masculinity for political office and mandates. A theorization of the relevance of gender-based violence in the political field should also reflect the interdependence of personal and structural violence. To interrelate both dimensions, violence must be distinguished from non-violence. For the investigation of personal gender-based violence, Walby et al. (2017) refer to physical contact by a perpetrator as well as to physical harm or non-consent of the person concerned. The criterion of physicality is widely accepted, but it poses some problems. In particular, the question arises in what respect hate speech is to be classified as violence, and how mental impairment, the physicality of which is not doubted, can be empirically investigated. Besides, it should be discussed which structural relations of inequality are to be classified as violence, and how violence and different dimensions of social inequality are differentiated. In addition, the term 'gender-based' should be reflected. This includes the meaning of gender in concrete acts of violence. Furthermore, the focus on gender-based violence against women should be extended to violence against non-hegemonic masculinities as well as homophobic and transphobic violence. This also implies women as perpetrators. In this context, violence can be regarded as an extension of the norm of masculinity and a breach of the norm of femininity (Hagemann-White 2002). These different aspects of gender-based violence in political institutions lead to the question of how the omnipresent potentiality of violence in the political field can be contained in such a way that democratic discourse and egalitarian participation do not fail from the outset due to explicit or implicit power and violence relations.