Caucus Democracy: A Feminist Political Science Fiction

Political science has always relied on fictions—the state of nature, the state of war, the social contract. Now, in a time of increasing repression, anti-democratic oligarchal government overreach, multinational corporations’ control over so many aspects of our lives, and “anticipatory obedience” to decrees that shred the rights and freedoms of women, people of color, LGBT persons, and poor people, the issue of democracy reveals democratic theory to rely again on fictions: that deliberation can resolve disagreement, that government relies on the will of the people, that elected officials actually represent our views. In my first monograph Rethinking Obligation: A Feminist Method for Political Theory (1992), I suggested an equally problematic fiction, I called “caucus democracy.” I seek to finish that work 35 years later. Taking off from the then-new “ethic of care” introduced by Gilligan that I used in Rethinking Obligation, I turn to the vast expansion of “care theory” since then by Fraser, Nadasen, Nedelski, and particularly Joan Tronto’s “caring democracy,” Martha Fineman’s “vulnerability theory,” and Tamara Metz’s and my recent work on “possessive familialism” (presented at the last ECPG in Ghent) to flesh out what caucus democracy would look like and how it would reorient the question of political obligation to create a more responsible and accountable democratic state. Fully acknowledging its problems, I consider the place of fictions like mine is in helping us resist and survive repressive authoritarian regimes and the ability to imagine a better world.