Redesigning Democracy: Intersectional Practices and the Politics of Inclusive Representation

The persistent exclusion and marginalization of minoritized groups remain a central issue in contemporary representative democracies. Despite efforts to increase descriptive representation, minority women and other marginalized groups often experience misrepresentation—their voices are heard but not truly listened to, and their concerns are instrumentalized or stereotyped to serve dominant narratives. Drawing on Michael Saward’s Democratic Design and Sarah Childs and Karen Celis’s feminist democratic design, this paper argues for the need to revisit political representation through intersectional practices that actively confront these systemic problems. To do so, this paper builds on insights from the literature on social movements and intersectionality to propose more equitable democratic processes, rethinking the inclusion and exclusion of both privileged and underprivileged groups, as well as the intersectional practices that redress power imbalances among different social groups.