Jane Mansbridge

Quota Problems: Combating the Dangers of Essentialism

As I write, descriptive representation by gender improves substantive outcomes for women in every polity for which we have a measure. And as I write, significant representation by gender cannot be achieved in any existing polity without some form of quota. At this historical moment, therefore, quotas play an important democratic role in increasing gender equality. Yet because quotas potentially produce institutional rigidity and their need should decrease as structural and cultural conditions improve, it is best to institute them in their most flexible form. Because quotas also encourage essentialism, it is best to institute them in conjunction with major efforts to define in nonessentialist ways the reasons for their institution. Although quotas will inevitably increase essentialist beliefs, a conscious, concerted campaign could mitigate the most destructive effects of this tendency. Many thanks to Lisa Baldez for help in editing these thoughts. Comments welcome: jane_mansbridge@harvard.edu .

Clarifying the Concept of Representation

This response to Andrew Rehfelds “Representation Rethought” (American Political Science Review 2009) takes up his criticisms of my “Rethinking Representation” (American Political Science Review 2003) to advance a more relational and systematic approach to representation. To this end, it suggests replacing the “trustee” concept of representation with a “selection model” based on the selection and replacement of “gyroscopic” representatives who are both relatively self-reliant in judgment and relatively nonresponsive to sanctions. It explores as well the interaction between representatives’ (and constituents’) perceptions of reality and their normative views of what the representative ought to represent. Building from the concept of surrogate representation and other features of legislative representation, it argues for investigating, both normatively and empirically, not only the characteristics of individual representatives emphasized by Rehfelds analysis but also the representative–constituent relationship and the larger representative system, including both elected and nonelected representatives, inside and outside the legislature.

Race Trumps Gender: The Thomas Nomination in the Black Community

Race and gender are intimately intertwined in the lives of Black women in the United States. Race constructs the way Black women experience gender; gender constructs the way Black women experience race. In the Senate hearings that pitted the word of Clarence Thomas against the sexual harassment accusations of Anita Hill, the great majority of Black women did not believe Hills accusations. Our analysis will set this disbelief against a background of substantial Black unity on political issues in the United States, Black feminism, television coverage of the event, and Black womens reactions to that television coverage. Contrary to the conclusion one might reasonably form from the primary White composition of all the major feminist organizations, Black women have usually given stronger support to the womens movement than Whites on surveys (see Table for self-identification as “feminist”). Even as early as 1970, 60% of Black women said they supported efforts to strengthen womens status in society, compared to only 37% of White women (Klein 1987: 26), and in 1972 67% said they were sympathetic to womens liberation groups, compared to only 35% of White women (hooks 1981: 148). Also contravening the impression one might form from the composition of feminist organizations, poor women and working class women are as likely as middle-class women to say on these surveys that they consider themselves “feminist.” The survey data are supported by indepth interviews among all classes of Black women.

Deliberative Polling as the Gold Standard

The Deliberative Polls of James Fishkin and Robert Luskin represent today the gold standard of attempts to sample what a considered public opinion might be on issues of political importance. 1 Those polls are also beginning to play a role in shaping public policy, as I believe they ought to do. They are an important new mechanism through which citizens can affect the laws and policies that affect them. They provide an opportunity for reflection and voice that is both more deliberative and more equal in practice than most elections. They play an increasingly legitimate role, both sociologically and normatively, in the system of citizen representation. Yet, as Fishkin points out in this new book, although Deliberative Polls have a positive effect on their participants’ subsequent participation in the electoral process, they do not mobilize the citizenry. They sacrifice widespread participation for greater deliberation and political equality. They are thus only one tool in a desirable democratic toolbox.

“Deliberative Democracy” or “Democratic Deliberation”?

Two traditions have grown up, side by side and intertwining, in the disciplines of philosophy and political science — the classic tradition of “deliberative democracy” and the more pluralist tradition of “democratic deliberation.”

Toward a Theory of Backlash: Dynamic Resistance and the Central Role of Power

To understand backlash theoretically, we must first carve out an analytically useful term from the cluster of its common political associations. In colloquial usage, “backlash” denotes politically conservative reactions to progressive (or liberal) social or political change (Faludi 1991 is a classic in this vein). Here, however, we attempt a nonideological definition of backlash embedded in a more neutral approach to its study. In colloquial usage, backlash includes acts of genuine persuasion as well as of power. Here, however, we suggest that it may be analytically helpful to confine its meaning to acts of coercive power. We draw on the sociological literature on social movements and countermovements, as well as the political science literature on power, preferences, and interests. We focus mostly on examples drawn from the United States and relating to feminism and gender. We begin where the process of backlash itself begins, with power and a challenge to the status quo.

The Cultural Politics of Everyday Discourse: The Case of “Male Chauvinist”

The spread of the term “male chauvinist,” coined in the United States around 1934, reveals the crucial work done in a social movement — in this case the second wave of American feminism — by what we call “everyday activists.” Everyday activists may not interact with the world of formal politics, but they take actions in their own lives to redress injustices that a contemporary social movement has made salient. The interplay between organized and everyday activists creates an evolutionary dynamic of “organized activist variation” and “everyday activist selection.” Organized activists in tightly-knit and protected enclaves (such as those in the American Communist Party in the 1930s or the feminist movement in the late 1960s) produce a cornucopia of counter-hegemonic concepts. Everyday activists then select the concepts they will use, primarily for the purpose of persuasion, in everyday talk.

What Is Political Science For

This address advances three ideas. First, political science as a discipline has a mandate to help human beings govern themselves. Second, within this mandate we should be focusing, more than we do now, on creating legitimate coercion. In a world of increasing interdependence we now face an almost infinite number of collective action problems created when something we need or want involves a “free-access good.” We need coercion to solve these collective action problems. The best coercion is normatively legitimate coercion. Democratic theory, however, has focused more on preventing tyranny than on how to legitimate coercion. Finally, our discipline has neglected an important source of legitimate coercion: negotiation to agreement. Recognizing the central role of negotiation in politics would shed a different light on our relatively unexamined democratic commitments to transparency in process and contested elections. This analysis is overall both descriptive and aspirational, arguing that helping human beings to govern themselves has been in the DNA of our profession since its inception.

Susan Moller Okin

The entry in W. H. Audens Commonplace Book for “Justice” cautions: “Whoever suffers from the malady of being unable to endure any injustice, must never look out of the window, but stay in his room with the door shut. He would also do well, perhaps, to throw away his mirror.” Susan Moller Okin suffered this malady but rejected the poets advice. She opened the window and looked in the mirror; her writings reflect sensitivity to injustice and acute awareness that her position of privilege and her good fortune made the work she did a moral imperative. The temper of her work was set by her political sensibility to the consequences of strength and weakness and by unflagging attention to the events of our world.

On the Importance of Getting Things Done

En este texto Jane Mansbrige reflexiona sobre el rol de la resistencia en democracia. La resistencia puede generar inaccion cuando se centra en detener y no en utilizar la coercion. A cambio, se trataria de mejorar la legitimidad de la accion democratica lo que incluiria la existencia de mecanismos de sancion. Una mejora de las instituciones democraticas y de los mecanismos de deliberacion que den cabida al input ciudadano permitiria, a su vez, una resistencia mas eficaz y organizada cuando esta fuera necesaria.