Rethinking Democratic Innovations through Feminist Theory and Social Movements

While gender issues remain central to processes of democratic erosion, resistance and responses often emerge from non-feminist actors. This broader social resonance of feminist insights highlights the need to reflect such dynamics in theoretical approaches to resistance and democratic renewal. This paper advances a theoretical argument for integrating feminist theory and social movement scholarship into the study of democratic innovations. Traditionally defined as institutional or procedural reforms that enhance citizen participation and deliberation, democratic innovations research has often remained formalistic and top-down, overlooking the importance of relational, affective, and everyday dimensions of politics for any joint democratic activity, long emphasized by feminist theorists. The paper aims to develop conceptual tools for empirical research by reorienting democratic innovation scholarship toward bottom-up collective action and feminist theoretical principles. By bringing feminist epistemologies into dialogue with social movement scholarship and democratic innovation literature, it redefines innovation not as procedural novelty but as an ongoing effort to reimagine and deepen democracy under conditions of democratic erosion. It argues that feminist theory provides essential normative and analytical resources for making democratic practices more inclusive, caring, and resilient.