Democratic (Re)Design for Unequal Democracies?

Democratizing democracy is a shared challenge confronting democratic theorists, designers, innovations scholars, practitioners, and those working on inclusion and equality. In too many places, democracies are conspicuously unequal. In contexts where anti-democratic and anti-equality politics coalesce, inequalities are liable to worsen rather than be resolved any time soon. Here we introduce Feminist Democratic Design (FDD), by critically engaging with Michael Saward’s Democratic Design and Anne Phillips’ Unconditional Equals. Persuaded by the latter’s shift to inequalities, we make the former’s democratic design framework, feminist. The first part of the article distinguishes between, and rejects, thin and thick equality designers in favour of democratic designers working with inequalities as a required principle. The second part illustrates how the application of an FDD framework for all democratic designers, significantly enhances the potential to democratize unequal democracies.