Democracy’s Invisible Labor: The Ethics and Politics of Caring for Democracy

There are no neutral ways of constructing spaces for participation – the terms of engagement will always reflect the relative powers of the actors involved. While this observation appears frequently in feminist and decolonial social critiques - of movements, academia, democracy, and public spheres – it has more profound consequences for the politics of participatory governance than many scholars currently acknowledge. While recent contributions to the literatures on contentious politics and deliberation seek to move beyond classic views that downplayed the importance of people’s differences, their engagement tend to take the form of amendments rather than considering whether a different democratic ideal may prove more productive. Here, I build upon works on the ethics of care to argue for a caring understanding of democracy. This differs from contentious politics, by emphasizing people’s interdependence and need to maintain and deepen human relations, and from deliberation, by addressing how public engagement is preconditioned on supportive private circumstances. Recent contributions have embraced critical and intersectional perspectives, but still, both these theories encourage us to build shared spaces that must rest on some assumptions about people’s everyday life. By contrast, ethics-of-care theorists suggest making the caring for such private relations the core substance of democracy, thus bringing everyday-life assumptions into the realm of politics. I aim to take this argument one step further, however, by challenging care theorists to examine one precondition that a politics of care shares with these two kindred approaches: democracy itself. A coherent theory of democratic care needs to consider the labor required to maintain and repair, not only our common world as such but its democratic basis as well.