Politics of Emancipation: A Feminist Defense of Randomly Selected Political Representatives

ABSTRACT

The presence of women in elected assemblies has been argued to transform the political agenda so that it better addresses the needs and interests of women. In this article, I reflect on women’s political representation by starting from democratic theories that point to the inadequacy of electoral democracy. I argue that, compared to including women in the political elite, dissolving the division of political labor between professional politicians and ‘ordinary’ citizens has a greater potential to challenge status quo gender relations. I suggest that political assemblies consisting of randomly selected citizens would better serve women’s self-determination and emancipation for three reasons: 1) allotted representatives would be more willing and able than elected representatives to critique social norms and practices, 2) the idea of allotted representatives better supports the idea that knowledge is situated, and 3) it better accommodates the notion that political merit is a gendered, racialized and class-based concept.

KEYWORDS:

• Descriptive representation
• women’s representation
• democratic innovations
• sortition

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers, participants at the Uppsala Gender and Politics seminar, the Politics seminar at Örebro University, and the panel Gender Equality in Political Representation Revisited at the ECPR General Conference 2020 for many helpful comments. Special thanks to Olle Folke, Markus Holdo, Malin Holm, Cecilia Josefsson, Martin Karlsson, Karin Leijon, Marina Muñoz Puig, Pär Zetterberg and Joachim Åström. I am also thankful to Kelley Friel for careful copy-editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vetenskapsrådet [2018-00703].

Notes on contributors

Zohreh Khoban

Zohreh Khoban is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University. Her research focuses on inclusion and equality in citizen deliberation and the emancipatory prospects of institutions for citizen participation.