Intersectionality and Innovations in Democratic Processes: Interrogating Access and Influence the UK, Canada, and Sweden

It is increasingly clear that democratic innovations must address how the intersections of race and gender structure parliaments, privileging some voices and excluding others (inter alia Brown 2014; Christoffersen and Siow 2024; Hawkesworth 2003; Kantola et al. 2023, Maddison 2010). As scholarship advances to consider parliaments as knowledge institutions (Geddes, forthcoming), we analyse how raced and gendered normative standards, operational criteria, and design principles structure parliamentary knowledge production, interpretation and application. Drawing on the Black feminist theory of intersectionality (inter alia Combahee River Collective 1977; Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Hill Collins 1990; Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith 1982; King 1988) and employing quantitative and qualitative analyses of civil society participation in policy processes in three national parliaments (Sweden, Canada, United Kingdom), we show how these processes marginalise and delegitimise gendered, raced and Indigenous knowledges, hindering both access to, and influence within, deliberation and policy formation. Importantly, our findings demonstrate that epistemic injustices and their representative consequences are unequal among marginalised groups. Firstly, knowledge contributed by extra-parliamentary actors representing (white) gendered interests is privileged over that contributed by Indigenous and racially minoritised groups. Secondly, both ontological frameworks and institutional logics privilege single-axis claims (focusing on e.g. race, Indigeneity or gender) over claims made by intersectionally marginalised groups such as Indigenous or racially minoritised women. We therefore argue that democratic innovations must address the ways that intersectional inequalities shape the values and processes which determine parliaments’ consumption, production and evaluation of knowledge, and their (un)democratic consequences.