Towards a Feminist Reconceptualisation of Democratic Consolidation

Attacks against women’s inclusion are increasingly recognised as a part of democratic deconsolidation. This invites a conceptual question: if the weakening of women’s inclusion today is taken as a sign of the deconsolidation of democracy, why have countries where women remain politically underrepresented been classified as consolidated democracies? This tension suggests a conceptual discrepancy and calls for a feminist interrogation of democratic consolidation. This paper makes two key arguments. First, the prevailing conceptualisation of democratic consolidation contains a male bias along its three key dimensions: constitutional, behavioural and attitudinal. Second, a feminist rethinking of democratic consolidation requires re-examining the conception of democracy that anchors it. Rather than prioritising the persistence of electoral and liberal democratic institutions and their gendered implications, I propose that a feminist rethinking of democratic consolidation should begin with two key questions: (a) what makes a concept of democracy feminist, and (b) what does consolidation mean for feminist democracy? I argue that a feminist (re)conceptualisation of democratic consolidation requires women’s inclusion, enables a critique of patriarchy, and interprets stability as a form of resistance to both regress and progress. This redefinition shifts our focus from purely celebrating institutional endurance towards recognising the precarity of inclusion. Rethinking democratic consolidation from a feminist perspective thus necessitates moving away from treating democratic consolidation as an all-encompassing status and instead recognises that democracy is always a disaggregated, continuous, and contested project. The paper concludes by outlining a research agenda for feminist democratic theory across the conceptual, behavioural and attitudinal dimensions of democratic consolidation.