Ailing Democracy and Declining Women’s Representation: How They Are Related and What to Do About It

This article by Lucina Robinson, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, highlights RepresentWomen's Cynthia Richie Terrell and her work to make voting systems more representative. Read an excerpt here.

Democracy promotion programs aimed at women have traditionally focused primarily on support for gender quotas in parliaments and legislatures, and training and supporting women candidates for office. Aiding Empowerment: Democracy Promotion and Gender Equality in Politics, a new book by Saskia Brechenmacher and Katherine Mann, examines the track record of gender equality programs and argues for a much broader approach to women’s empowerment, essentially by making democracies more democratic. These prescriptions dovetail with other democracy promotion proposals put forward by groups like the Partners in Democracy project led by Harvard’s Danielle Allen, the FairVote organization cofounded by Rob Ritchie and his wife, Cynthia Terrell, who is also CEO of RepresentWomen. The premise is that both democracy and women would benefit from reforms that make voting systems more representative, such as ranked choice voting, which has begun to be adopted in several U.S. states and localities. Proportional representation or mixed electoral systems consistently result in much higher levels of women’s representation compared to single-member winner-take-all voting schemes (28.7 percent versus 11.7 percent in the past year’s elections).

Other reforms to make democracies more democratic include measures to make political parties more democratic. The male gatekeepers who dominate the world’s political parties are often a key obstacle to women achieving real influence in the critical decisions of what legislation is brought forward and its content, not to mention candidate selection, party support for candidacies, and positions on party lists. Also, the legislatures themselves are often run in undemocratic ways, and parliamentary reform is needed to permit more voices to be heard. Such measures could decrease the perception that politics is a rigged game. Disillusion with democracy has been on the rise, as reflected in polls that show younger generations’ lower appreciation for this form of government and greater willingness to embrace authoritarianism.

Read the complete article here.