The Cost of Caring: Unimaginable Political Careers

Notwithstanding extensive literature problematising care work as a supply-side barrier restricting carers’, mostly women’s, access to electoral politics, political institutions have largely failed to take these concerns seriously, maintaining the image of the ‘ideal’ politician as the unencumbered man. Framed by Joan Tronto’s Caring Democracy (2013), this paper argues that care is central to democratic life, and that care offers a powerful lens for understanding how gendered expectations shape the conditions, cultures and trajectories of political careers. Drawing on qualitative interviews with carers and Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), and revisiting scholarship on political eligibles and aspirants (Norris and Lovenduski, 1995), the study traces the path of exclusion that begins long before political entry and endures within political office. It finds that carers’ exclusion is not simply a matter of structural constraint, but of representational possibility. Political careers appear both practically inaccessible and imaginatively closed off to those who engage with practices of care. Yet carers are far from apolitical; caring necessitates practices of negotiation, advocacy, active listening and complex problem-solving, the very skills that sustain good democratic representation. To care is a representational act; however, within political institutions, these skills remain feminised and devalued, and recast as personal disposition rather than political proficiency. Coupled with time poverty, exhaustion, enduring exclusion, and the uncaring nature of politics, makes it difficult for carers to see themselves as legitimate political actors. Once in office, care responsibilities remain a source of constraint. Shaping political retention, the cultural penalties for prioritising care make political careers unsustainable to many, even when formal accommodations exist. Even ‘family-friendly’ institutions reproduce cultures of constant availability, unpredictability and reliance on informal care networks. Carers and MSPs recognise that care and politics need not be incompatible, yet under current institutional conditions appear mutually exclusive, and struggle to see a pathway forward to caring and inclusive democratic institutions. Not now, but not never. To create caring and gender equal institutions, this paper argues that we must extend Tronto’s concept of ‘caring with’ to confront cultural and practical barriers to carers' political inclusion.