Three new books address the issue of women in elective office and women’s policy representation. All take as their starting point the reality that many women already hold political office and do so in many countries, but not in numbers proportional to women’s presence in national populations and not in numbers representing the diversity of women in terms of class, ethnicity, race, and other politically relevant characteristics. All three books emphasize that women’s lack of inclusion in politics—for all women—has repercussions for democracy. These books, read together, tell a troubling story about women’s political representation and the prospects for citizen equality, meaningful public policy for women, democratic empowerment, and meaningful advances in and protections of democracy.
More Women in Parliaments, More Political Women
In Seeing Women, Strengthening Democracy, Magda Hinojosa and Miki Kittilson take as their starting point the distinctive presence of women in Latin American politics. Noting that “just a few years ago, more than 40 percent of Latin Americans were governed by a female president, as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Costa Rica simultaneously had women occupying the presidential palace” (p. 1), they ask whether the presence of women in politics affects how citizens connect with their political system and whether women and men are similarly affected. They hypothesize that substantial increases in the numbers of women in national legislatures will have a positive and distinctive impact on female citizens, increasing their sense of political efficacy, level of interest in politics, political knowledge, attention to political events, and willingness to engage in political discussion. They “test how visible and sizable gains in women’s officeholding affect mass-level political support” and examine the ensuing consequences for democracy (p. 8).
In Latin America, substantial differences are evident between men’s and women’s political involvement at the mass level. Relying on Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) data, Hinojosa and Kittilson hypothesize that political context—an egalitarian political culture and socialization to politics—sets important conditions for women’s political participation, and that the presence of women in the political elite is an important contextual variable. More specifically, highly visible and substantial improvements in women’s presence at the highest levels of government are the conditions that have a powerful influence on women’s political engagement and connection to democracy.
Hinojosa and Kittilson face a data challenge in testing their hypotheses and are forthright in identifying it, carefully marshaling evidence and noting deficiencies. They model the impact of women’s political inclusion, identifying two stages of visible improvements: the legislation of gender quotas and distinctive increases in the percentage of women elected to parliament. Using LAPOP data for the years 2004–19, they examine five cases—Bolivia 2009, 2014; Honduras 2005; Nicaragua 2011; and Panama 2014—in which women’s legislative inclusion increased dramatically, in a single election cycle, by at least 20% (p. 56). The authors analyze each case, being careful and clear in noting that the LAPOP data were not intended to test this model and hence offer a weak test, producing mixed results (p. 58).
To address the data issues, Hinojosa and Kittilson developed a survey, targeted to known political events, for the single case of Uruguay. Uruguay’s gender quota law, which passed in 2009, signaled the potential for a substantial and visible increase in the numbers of women running for and winning national legislative office in the 2014 elections, five years later. Anticipating the impact of the gender quota law, Hinojosa and Kittilson used a two-wave pre- and postelection survey to assess the impact of the visibility of women running for office and the “subsequent increase in women’s share of elected positions” (p. 27). Relying on visible cue theory, the authors anticipate that “having more women in politically powerful positions [will signal] that politics is not strictly an arena for men (but only if citizens are aware of women’s political presence)” (p. 28) and that “more equitable representation in … political institutions” will improve women’s connections to political life with positive consequences for democracy (p. 29). This relationship, they argue, is likely to hold only under conditions where change and improvements are big, sudden, and visible. The single case study allows them to control for party system, political system, and additional factors that serve as constants, increasing confidence that increases in women’s political engagement, interest, knowledge, and efficacy, among other factors, can be attributed to the increase in and visibility of numbers of elected women.
Hinojosa and Kittilson further test the impact of substantial increases in women’s parliamentary presence on women’s positive connections to the political system and support for democracy by examining trust in elections to the Uruguayan Electoral Court and to parliament, as well as pride in the political system and more general support for democratic institutions as measured by a composite scale.
In most cases, the major differences between Uruguayan women and men that are evident before the election diminish substantially and lose statistical significance postelection. As Hinojosa and Kittilson show, increased numbers of women in public office had a specific impact on women; although these changes also increased men’s mass-level political involvement and connection, the impact for women erased participatory and attitudinal differences with their male counterparts. Where women were less politically interested and evinced less political knowledge and lower levels of political efficacy before the 2014 elections, and gender differences were relatively large and statistically significant, gender-related differences disappeared postelection. Where women were more trusting of political institutions than were men, trust differences increased, becoming statistically significant. The authors conclude that “the election of sizable numbers of women to political office fortifies women’s political connections … consistent across a variety of measures, indicating that it is a robust finding and not an artifact of the way we measure political support” (p. 122).
Seeing Women, Strengthening Democracy is explicit about the relationship between women’s political presence and democracy. The authors provide a clear and detailed justification for linking the potential positive impacts of women’s representation to democracy, providing evidence that visible increases in women’s parliamentary presence improve and strengthen women’s attitudinal and behavioral connections to the political system. In sum, Seeing Women, Strengthening Democracy offers a positive, empowering vision of women’s political representation and democracy, as well as a cautionary but optimistic picture of a feminist democratic future.
More Women in Politics, More Violence against Women
In Violence against Women in Politics, Mona Lena Krook similarly addresses women’s inclusion in politics and the consequences for democracy, but she offers a much less optimistic, even chilling, analysis of the costs of women’s political engagement. She identifies targeted violence against political women as suppressing women’s political inclusion, with negative and comprehensive impacts on democracy. Krook argues that “violence against women in politics is a distinct phenomenon involving a broad range of harms to attack and undermine women as political actors,” with the goal of excluding “women as a group from political life” (p. 4). The book details the development of the concept and understanding of violence against women in politics and the history of such violence and its damage. Krook uses an inductive analysis to categorize forms of such violence, introducing a new category of violence against women in politics and developing a methodology for data collection focusing on “bias events” (chapter 10).
Krook identifies four conventional types of violence against women in politics: physical, psychological, sexual, and economic. Physical violence, the type used least frequently against women in politics, encompasses “a wide range of bodily harms involving unwanted contact and confinement resulting in death or injury” (p. 127); examples include murder and attempted murder, physical mutilation, beatings, torture, and arbitrary arrest. Psychological violence “inflicts trauma on individuals’ mental state or emotional well-being” (p. 139), involving threats, intimidation, shunning, blackmail, and other actions intended to disempower women. Sexual violence involves assaults on a woman’s sexuality and sexual characteristics (p. 154); examples of sexual violence include rape, attempted rape, and other forms of sexual assault, including sexual blackmail. Finally, economic violence involves threats or actions that target a woman’s property or income designed to impose “economic hardship and deprivation as a means of control,” such as vandalism, theft, extortion, and “threats to terminate employment,” among others (p. 177). Psychological violence, Krook asserts, is the most common form of violence against women in politics; sexual violence is the least reported. Economic violence, relatively rarely employed against women in politics in Europe, is the second most common form of violence used against women at the global level (p. 178).
Krook introduces a fifth, additional category of violence against women in politics: semiotic violence, “the use of language and images to denigrate women in an attempt to deny their political rights,” and intended to signal that women as a group are “unworthy” of political inclusion (p. 67). Its intention, like all forms of violence against women in politics, is “to exclude women as women from participating in political life” (p. 65; emphasis in original). These forms of violence are manifested across time in targeting women as a group and as individuals; forms of violence work both separately and collectively, and they have a cumulative, damaging impact on the political lives of women. Krook devotes a chapter to each of these five types of violence, further developing each category, providing detailed examples, and identifying potential and actual state and activist solutions.
As Krook notes, violence against women occurs in spaces where their male counterparts are not subjected to political violence and where violent perpetrators can be women, as well as men. Political violence is not simply the cost that all must pay to be politically active (pp. 71, 97). Women, Krook demonstrates, pay an additional and intensified price for being women who are politically active, and she identifies a wide range of female political actors subject to violence. In addition to voters, community activists, political candidates, and elected officials, Krook includes female political journalists and female human rights activists (p. 40) as women subjected to threats and acts of violence: all are political women targeted both for who they are and for what they do (p. 38).
Moreover, violence against women does not come solely from conventional political opponents. Intra-party violence against women, in various forms, is not uncommon (p. 131; see also for examples, Hawkesworth Reference Hawkesworth2003; Lovenduski Reference Lovenduski2005). Actors in civil society, such as religious leaders, are powerful agents in disciplining and discouraging political women by making threats and committing acts of violence against them. Family members serve as major enforcers of women’s exclusion from politics, enacting a range of violence against wives, sisters, and daughters who seek to participate in politics (p. 129).
Krook confirms that violence directed at women who run for office—or who even dare to vote—does not vary by political system, political party, level of political office, or candidacy for office. She also argues that increases in violence against women in politics cannot be fully explained as a backlash in response to increases in the number of women in elective office. Although high levels of crime and weak state capacity (p. 71), among other important contextual factors, affect the level and tolerance of violence against women in politics, the range of actors involved shows how “violence against women is normalized in different environments” (p. 72). Violence against women in politics has been persistent and tolerated across history and region; it does not only emerge in response to specific events or circumstance, but also is a commonly used political tool. Public recognition of such violence, made visible by activists, confirms that “violence has long served as a tool to exclude women from political life” (p. 52).
Employing a range of examples, relying on secondary research, and summarizing findings from international organizations, Krook makes a strong case that the use of political violence against women degrades democracy. Violent attacks on female candidates and elected women undermine the electoral process and citizens’ belief in their own political efficacy and in democratic representation. Policy deliberation and collective efforts at policy production are damaged and rendered difficult when women are intimidated or threatened into silence. Threats of physical violence and physical attacks, including assassination attempts, deter women from seeking office or force them to leave office. Such attacks can also deter female journalists from investigative reporting, thereby lessening freedom of the press and, as Krook argues, freedom of expression “to receive and impart information” (p. 249). Threats and actual violence can silence female human rights activists who are acting to extend democratic rights and protections. The results for democracy are damaging, in that human rights, recognized and inscribed in national and international law, are weakened of their meaning and their powers of application. A crucially important book on the cost women pay for being women in politics, Violence against Women in Politics offers a sobering perspective on women’s representation and inclusion in politics, even in democratic political systems.
Women, Democracy, and Representation
Women’s political representation and democracy are the core foci of Karen Celis and Sarah Childs’s Feminist Democratic Representation. This brave and ambitious work is the result of years of conversation, debate, response to critiques, practical political work, and scholarly research. The book offers a major challenge to democratic theorists who do not take into account women as a large, diverse group with a multiplicity of issue preferences and to empirical political scientists whose research emphasizes women’s presence in electoral office without considering the institutional contexts that make women’s policy representation problematic.
Celis and Childs launch their critique of contemporary democratic theory by asserting that “today women cannot trust democracy to do good by us” (p. 11). Women are underrepresented and misrepresented in politics, with gender equality efforts being undermined or reversed “despite an increasing presence of women in formal politics in many countries” (p. 13). This is the conundrum of the book: how to improve and ensure the political representation of women, in substantive terms, in “democratic” legislatures that do not do well by women, even as women’s descriptive representation may be increasing. If having more women in politics will not serve to improve women’s policy chances, what will? Celis and Childs propose a radical political innovation that would bring more women directly into parliamentary politics but not necessarily into formal elective office.
The authors begin by constructing a vision of “representation as it should be.” Representation, they argue, relies on the “public and private sharing of women’s lived experiences” and “requires that all who are affected by the issue, and the diversity of views, contribute to the public political conversation.” Public sharing—involving “acts of listening, deliberation, and decision-making” (pp. 22–23)—must take place within a fully democratic context. Celis and Childs’s goal is to construct a new institution, shifting the national legislative context to provide representation as it should be for and by women.
Celis and Childs make a concerted case for the inclusion of all women’s voices, not only in terms of intersectionality but also in terms of giving presence and voice to conservative women and to women who are explicitly antifeminist, if not antidemocratic. They recognize that the full inclusion of women’s voiced experiences will reveal the extent to which women disagree on a wide range of issues, while indicating where diverse groups of women may come to agreement about policy preferences. They argue that the resulting “open and visible contestation over what is in the interests of women [will contribute] to the quality of women’s political representation” (p. 27). “In political representation as it should be, elected representatives fully recognize their role in representing women and are accountable to them about their actions and decisions” (p. 26; emphasis in original), overcoming what the authors refer to as “women’s poverty of representation” (p. 32; emphasis in original).
Feminist Democratic Representation proposes a new institutional arrangement constructed on three feminist principles that provide full articulation of the diverse, politically relevant experiences of women. The institution must be inclusive, egalitarian, and responsive (p. 43) and hence structured to provide an optimal process within which content can be made public and debatable by “affected representatives of women”(p. 43; emphasis in original), who provide group advocacy and account giving. Such an institution must provide places where women can make direct demands and where women can re-gender the political agenda (p. 38).
The proposed structure brings sets of women, temporarily and issue focused, directly into parliament. Women constitute a new, additional set of parliamentary actors, with “the status of representatives and a formal institutionalized role in the representative process [making] them ‘equals of sorts’ with elected representatives,” supplementing and informing the work of members of parliament (pp. 126–27). Affective representatives, located in civil society, are to be “chosen by the women they represent” (p. 127); “it is for women mobilizing around a particular issue, position, or perspective to determine who should represent them when parliament debates a law or topic that pertains to that group of women” (p. 133). Affective representatives are selected by organized groups of women “through political mobilization in civil society,” where “all representatives must be recognized as such by those they seek to represent” (pp. 132, 134). Affective representatives hold active, positional power over elected representatives and are selected anew for each issue (p. 131).
This new structure is intended to provide specific attention to women’s issues, where women advocate forcefully for them to “ensure that elected representatives … cannot claim ignorance” about such issues or their consequences for subsequent legislation (p. 137). All members of parliaments, in response to women’s group advocacy, must give a public account justifying their policy positions. Account-giving “is a new and institutionalized parliamentary moment required of all elected representatives” (p. 144; emphasis in original); it constitutes “a collective endeavor in which elected representatives as a group of legislators defend their actions” (p. 145; emphasis in original). These requirements, Celis and Childs argue, provide incentives to legislators to take affected representatives seriously, to engage in deliberation of women’s issues, and “to do their best by women” (p. 144). Incentives of account-giving function to reward and to sanction members of parliaments, producing legislators’ “desire to be recognized for having adjudicated fairly” (p. 148) and to avoid being seen to have acted unjustly or to be compared unfavorably to their peers. Unjust or dismissive behavior on the part of legislators could exact future reselection or reelection costs and could provoke political movement protest and mobilization. Although temporary and issue specific, the presence of affective representatives of women will institutionalize their relationship to elected members of parliament and establish accepted routines of interaction and consultation, providing “system-level gendered accountability” (p. 170). Celis and Childs identify additional potential positive impacts, including elected officials “feel[ing] better about themselves as representatives” (p. 162), enjoying increased personal job satisfaction, and feeling more connected to female constituents (p. 163). Finally, women in the mass public may be more likely to engage in formal politics, seeing the positive representational consequences of representation by affected representative women (p. 164), as Hinojosa and Kittilson argue.
Feminist Democratic Representation does not purport to show how such institutional innovation might be implemented. Instead, it advances the claim that all women require representation as women. Celis and Childs embrace the challenge, made explicit in their book, of arguing for the representation of conservative women, right-wing women, and women who are explicitly antifeminist. The authors give much less attention to intersectional issues of race, ethnicity, and poverty in feminist representational terms and to the disempowering consequences of inequalities in group advocacy (Piven and Cloward Reference Piven and Cloward1979; Strolovitch Reference Strolovitch2007). Celis and Childs treat group advocacy as equally available to all groups, failing to recognize that conservative women are advantaged in having misogynistic allies already positioned in parliament to support many of their demands. Feminist Democratic Representation raises the question of full representation of all women, but raises without resolution the tension in the feminist democratic representational project: advancing an anti-racist feminism while advancing women.
Conclusion
These three books join and enrich the continuing debate concerning women’s political representation worldwide (Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson Reference Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson2014; Htun Reference Htun2016; Schwindt-Bayer Reference Schwindt-Bayer2010; Wylie Reference Wylie2018; Young Reference Young2000) and give evidence of a strong political drag on women’s activism (Beckwith Reference Beckwith, Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson2014, 22; see also Baldez Reference Baldez2002). Reading Hinojosa and Kittilson’s evidence and argument in reverse, women’s levels of political engagement, interest, knowledge, involvement, and efficacy are depressed as the result of women’s underrepresentation in elite politics, with women’s exclusion functioning to impede their civic and political life chances.
Violence against Women in Politics supports a similar conclusion. Political elites, family members, co-partisans, and others have to enact violence to dissuade women from running for public office, reporting on political events, serving as judges, and mobilizing to advance human rights. The desire for political inclusion and the capacity to advance one’s interests are so strong among women—across countries, political systems, and political parties—that explicit barriers must be constructed to keep women out. The question is not why women do not participate in politics, but how women get past the barriers to do so.
Political parties are major actors in suppressing women’s democratic inclusion. Although left-wing parties generally do better than right-wing parties in advancing women as candidates and securing their electoral success, women’s underrepresentation persists in parties across a left–right ideological spectrum that, as Celis and Childs note, does not accommodate many of the policy concerns that women hope to advance. They argue that “parties are overwhelmingly responsible for the low numbers of women in our elected political institutions” (p. 46) and anticipate that “prejudice against … women by party gatekeepers will not dissipate any time soon” (p. 180). Krook finds that the type of political party makes no difference in the extent of violence against women in politics. If this is the case, solutions for redress will have to include institutional innovations directed at political parties.
Feminist Democratic Representation challenges feminists and democratic theorists to envision possibilities of institutional change that would bring all women fully into political life. Celis and Childs’s proposed new parliamentary institution, which positions organized women’s groups within existing parliaments that require account giving, envisions new representative relationships inclusive of women that lead elected officials to experience “doing good by women as more important than sticking to one’s stated personal or party position … because elected representatives are by design institutionally incentivized to care about representing women well” (pp. 185–86). This is the book’s weakest point: it is unclear how new incentives for elected officials to advance feminist democratic representation can counter reelection concerns, party solidarity, masculinist bonding, and other incentives already strongly in play. As Hawkesworth (Reference Hawkesworth2020) and Restrepo Sanin (Reference Restrepo Sanin2020) argue, the democratic state is structured, legally and practically, to keep women from public office, regardless of individual incentives.
A major challenge to any proposals for feminist institutional change is misogyny in political life, which is nested in structural and cultural violence against women and reinforced by the symbolic violence of assumptions of male dominance as “natural.” In the current political moment, it is worth asking whether institutional change can repair and redress the exclusion of women from meaningful politics in democracies, where the debate about democracy and women’s political inclusion has to take account of the femicidal state (Shalhoub-Kevorkian Reference Shalhoub-Kevorkian2003), state structure, and political power, and how democracy is implicated. These three books enliven and intensify this debate. Even as they cannot provide full answers, they help us imagine an inclusive and empowering feminist democratic politics.
