Caring Democracy as Feminist Democratic Innovation: Insights from Scotland’s Carers Parliament

Feminist critiques of participatory and deliberative democracy have long revealed exclusionary norms that constrain marginalised groups’ inclusion in democratic innovation. Yet practice has largely failed to take these concerns seriously, and remains focused on deliberative quality while paying less attention to the broader material and relational conditions that make participation possible. This paper argues that if innovations are to realise their democratic promise, then they must also become caring. Participation in democratic innovations remains inseparable from the unequal distribution of care in society, demanding significant time, energy, and resources, unevenly distributed along lines of gender, race, class and disability. Drawing on Joan Tronto's Caring Democracy (2013), this paper contends that to ‘care’ democratically has the transformative potential to reimagine democratic innovations in ways that are inclusive, egalitarian and that account for the human condition to provide care and be cared for. In addition to established democratic innovations that have been analysed from a feminist perspective, alternative parliaments (APs) – such as youth, women’s, and Indigenous parliaments – have not yet been considered. Designed to give voice to those structurally marginalised in representative democracy, APs’ formal and symbolic connections to parliaments proper render them more than simple institutional imitations, rather hybrid spaces in which deliberation intersects with established processes of representation, making them important sites to examine democratic inclusion. Scotland’s ‘Carers Parliament’ has been in existence for over a decade, bringing unpaid carers into conversation with key decision-makers, amid increasing care deficits and budget cuts. As an innovation aimed specifically at an already marginalised group, we might reasonably expect the Carers Parliament to elevate the voices of those structurally excluded and augment decision-making processes. Non-participant observation of the event reveals that even it falls short of feminist expectations. While providing a platform for political voice, the Carers Parliament continues to exclude those most marginalised by intersecting inequalities, and does not enable sufficient responsiveness to newly present parliamentarians’ concerns. If these spaces, close in proximity to formal institutions and designed to explicitly engage those structurally underrepresented, remain insufficient, we must also ask what additional practices and structures are required to enable meaningful participation. Caring democracy offers a practical alternative, expanding the critique of deliberative norms to a requirement that participation must be understood as a form of labour, materially supported, emotionally sustainable, and institutionally embedded (Holdo, 2023). Moving beyond binaries, such an approach recognises intersecting inequalities and recommends specific caring infrastructures to sustain meaningful engagement. Through Tronto’s five stages of care: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and solidarity, this paper offers a framework for analysis and a set of principles and practices that can guide the development of truly inclusive and feminist democratic innovations. Applying this framework to the Carers Parliament highlights the additional structures needed to support the inclusion of those similarly excluded: material and emotional support for participants to remunerate participation as labour, institutionalised processes of care to encourage the articulation of different voices, and accountability measures to foster trust between participants, organisers, and institutions to sustain collective political engagement over time.