Political parties

Is inclusion the wrong goal for local politics?: why how women are included matters as much as whether they are included.

/ jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Tanya Jakimow

There are several self-evident truths when it comes to achieving gender equity in local government. Increasing women’s political participation is the first step and an unproblematic good. The focus must hence be on removing barriers to ensure elected bodies are representative of the broader population. When gender parity is achieved, political institutions will change, to become more gender sensitive, more deliberative, less conflictual.

More than thirty years after the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action towards gender equality, these axioms are looking shaky. Why have substantial increases in women’s participation as party members, candidates and local representatives not significantly challenged men’s political dominance? Inclusion is not enough, and sometimes, it may even be the problem.

Research from parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, shows that women are not absent or excluded from democratic life, they are active participants. Put differently, women make important contributions to local politics but in ways that are rendered invisible, unrewarded, taken for granted, and exploited. They are included, but on disadvantageous terms.

Challenging the political dominance of ‘majority’ men hence requires going beyond addressing women’s exclusion to examine the terms of their incorporation: the contributions women make to democratic life and electoral politics; what they receive in terms of political opportunity or power; against the costs and burdens of their participation.

Take for example Gayatri*, who has been a loyal party worker in Dehradun: a city in North India. For two decades she has invested time, energy and money to her party, organising ‘supporters’ to attend rallies, connecting residents to government entitlements and campaigning during elections.

These activities generate significant positive political sentiment towards her party, but are often invisible, under-recognised, rendered ‘outside of politics’, and hence unrewarded. When she requested the party ticket to contest municipal elections in a seat reserved for women, the party instead selected the wife of a new party member. Gayatri declared: “This is exploitation! I will never work for the party again”.

Or Ibu Dewi*, who was approached to be a candidate in Medan’s 2024 local elections in Indonesia. The party needed her to fulfil gender candidate electoral quotas that require every third position on the ballot to be a woman. For over three months, Dewi spoke to small groups of women, organised campaign events and went door-to-door, promoting the party, then the presidential campaign, and only then her own campaign.

Dewi expended her physical and emotional resources, and depleted her household savings. For her efforts, she received less than 300 votes in a ward of 20,000 voters. She was heartbroken, and furious: ‘All this effort for what? Only the parties benefited from my campaign.’

Even as elected representatives, women often do more for less recognition. Sarah* was elected as a councillor in Sydney, Australia, on the basis of her community advocacy. After her election, she got to work reopening a swimming pool: applying for the government grant, chairing the committee, and liaising with community to redesign the facilities.

When it came to cutting the ribbon however, it was the Mayor who took centre stage, inviting his political allies alongside him. His party claimed this achievement in their re-election campaign material. Across councils in my home state of New South Wales, community members, council staff and councillors reported women as being diligent, putting in the work but not receiving the credit. This under-recognition has electoral consequences; Sara was not re-elected.

My comparative ethnography of local politics in India, Indonesia and Australia shows that the terms of women’s incorporation at each stage of the ‘ladder of political recruitment’ is often inequitable, and at times exploitative: women do more, bear more burdens, for fewer returns, compared to men. This is the case not only for women, and not all women equally. Structural relations of power such as white supremacy, religious majoritarianism, caste, ableism also shape the terms of incorporation into local politics.

I am not suggesting that we should not strive to achieve gender parity, or better put, to ensure that people of all genders are present and have influence within political systems. Inclusion remains an important goal, as are removing the barriers to exclusion. But reforming electoral democracy only through inclusion is insufficient. There is an equal need to transform its underlying value-system towards genuine democratic practice in which everyone participates on equal terms.

*All names are pseudonyms

Tanya Jakimow is a professor of anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Tanya’s current research concerns the enduring problem of political over-/under-representation in local government in India, Indonesia, and more recently, Australia. https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/persons/tanya-jakimow/

The Participatory Party

/ jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Phil Swann

The urgency of Sonia Busso’s call for councils to develop participatory governance arrangements is evident in her recent INLOGOV policy paper[1], The Participatory Council. Bussu recognises that politicians can enable or block this development and argues that progress can be impeded if the council as an institution is not prepared for meaningful participation. I argue in this blog that an equally important precondition of action is that political parties are engaged in participatory processes, reflecting their roles in both councils and wider civic society.

The Participatory Party should sit alongside the Participatory Council.

Bussu sets out a convincing set of recommendations to advance inclusive participation including developing the role of boundary spanners, building on existing community assets and resources, and adopting an intersectional approach to engage marginalised voices.

She recognises the part that political parties played in two of the five case she refers to: the introduction of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre in Brazil; and the radical widening of the participatory infrastructure and processes in Barcelona. A third case, the deployment of citizens’ assemblies in the London Borough of Camden, was initiated by the then council leader Georgia Gould[2] following her recognition of the councils’ failure to listen to the residents of tower blocks in the borough before the tragic Grenfell Fire.

Bussu distinguishes between “disjointed events vulnerable to the political cycle” and “coherent processes embedded in day-to-day policymaking”, an ambition which is reflected in Gould’s final leader’s annual report in which she claimed the council was “getting on with a radical shift in power that is seeing democratic renewal led from the bottom up”.

In my view, however.  more attention needs to be paid to how political parties can play bigger roles both in enriching civic society and in embedding participatory process in the way that Bussu seeks. This is particularly important at a time when populist parties are opting for simplistic solutions rather than engaging with the hard graft of participatory policymaking.

Gould, for example, in a lecture in 2022 called for a move beyond a transactional model of public services. Demanding the abandonment of traditional structures and hierarchies and a recognition of the power of communities and the ability of residents to change their lives, she warned that “services that don’t have a connection to communities or an understanding of their needs can be de-humanising, paternalistic and create a transactional model of public services that cannot make lives better in the longer term.”

In terms of the contribution of politicians and political parties to this, there are three key lessons from the experience of three of Gould’s predecessors: Herbert Morrison, leader of the London County Council and dynamo of Atlee’s post-war government; Richard Crossman, Minister for Housing and Local Government in Harold Wilson’s first cabinet; and David Blunkett, leader of Sheffield and holder of three cabinet posts in Tony Blair’s government.

First, the potential for exploiting the contribution of political parties as an important feature of the wider civic society. Morrison, for example, was clear that it was impossible to understand local government without understanding how political parties worked. It was “out of the clash of opinion and principle between the parties” that progress was made. For Crossman vibrant local government hinged on overcoming public apathy and that political parties had the potential to do that so long as party membership provided substantive opportunities to influence party policy. Writing when he was leader of the Labour Group on Oxford City Council in 1939 he said: democracy inside our parties is as valuable a part of our liberties as the right of voting at elections.”

Blunkett believed that the value of local politics was not confined to its legal powers, but to its ability to extend and develop democracy enabling the emergence of new social movements. During the period when he was leader of Sheffield, Blunkett argued that “if we can stimulate the community action that brings people into the [Labour] party and gets them to relate their community problems to a sense of political purpose, then we have begun to change society.”

Second, the value of engagement beyond the council and the party. Towards the end of his period as a leading local politician Blunkett warned that town halls could feel “impossibly remote and anonymous”. Reflecting on the state of local government in 2023, he said council leaders should do more than run their authority: they should see the council as a mechanism for fully engaging local people. Morrison, in his reflections on his period as leader of the LCC in the 1930s, came to a similar conclusion: “It was important that councillors and aldermen, once elected and appointed, should still move among the people they represented. They should be with and for the people, not above them.”

Finally, the key link between local government and wider civic society. Crossman was clear that “the real basis of successful political democracy is not to be found in politics at all, but below the surface in the organisation of a whole network of popular interests”. He argued that the future of the Labour party depended on not on the competence of its leaders and its electoral success, but also on the creation of “new organisations for the conquest of liberties yet unwon.” Blunkett was equally honest about the need for local politicians to avoid paternalism. Writing in 2002, when he was Home Secretary, Blunkett described how every since his first experience of canvassing in his council ward he had been “keen to inform and involve as many residents of Sheffield and its environs as possible in the aims and decision-making of the council.”

Bussu is right to stress that participatory governance requires sustained political commitment and is vulnerable to political change. The work of Gould and politicians such as Morrison, Crossman and Blunkett has created the foundations on which to build a participatory party. And Andy Burnham’s statements about how he intends to lead the Labour Party and listen to communities suggests that now is a good time to do so.

Phil Swann is studying for a PhD on the contribution of politicians to central-local government relations at the University of Birmingham.

[1] The Participatory Council
http://epapers.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4443/

[2] Now an MP and minister