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Popular consensus holds that if "enough women" are present in political institutions they will represent "women's interests," however, such generalized assumptions are frequently queried on theoretical grounds and consistently shown to be conditional in practice. In this book, Karen Celis and Sarah Childs address women's poverty of political representation with a new feminist account of democratic representation. Celis and Childs rethink and redesign representative institutions, taking ideological and intersectional differences as their starting point. Inclusive, responsive, and egalitarian representation for all women demands a new category of representatives in parliaments: the "affected representatives of women," those who are epistemologically and experientially close to differently affected women. Affected representatives advocate within political institutions and publicly hold elected representatives to account, transforming representational effects, deepening relationships between women and their democratic institutions.
Karen Celis is Research Professor at the Department of Political Science, and co-director of Research of RHEA Research Centre Gender Diversity Intersectionality of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She conducts theoretical and empirical research on the democratic quality of political representation from the perspective of disadvantaged groups and intersectionality. She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook on Gender and Politics.
Sarah Childs is Professor of Gender and Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research is centered on the theory and practice of women's representation, gender and political parties, parliaments, and institutional change. She is the author of New Labour's Women MPs and Women and British Party Politics, co-author of Sex, Gender and the Conservative Party with Paul Webb, and author of 2016 The Good Parliament Report on the UK House of Commons.
