Introduction: The Descriptive and Substantive Representation of Women: New Directions

Feminist engagement with the concept of representation dates back more than ten years. The starting place for much of this discussion is Hanna Pitkin's seminal The Concept of Representation.1 According to Pitkin, the crucial dividing line in forms of representation is the distinction between ‘standing for’ and ‘acting for’ representation. Famously, she states that an over-emphasis upon the composition of political bodies prevents a proper focus upon the activity of representation; in her view, it is more important to focus on what representatives do than on who they are. Thus Pitkin contends, and many mainstream scholars of political representation concur, political representation should be conceived of in a substantive way, defining it as ‘acting in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them’.2 Many feminists have been less sure. Pitkin's thesis conflicts with feminist claims and feminist political theory in two crucial ways. First, feminist concern with gendered power, gendered structures and gender divisions of labour in society draws attention to the universal numerical under-representation of women in electoral politics. For feminists, reasons of justice and fairness, at the minimum, demand that women should be present in our elected political institutions.3 Secondly, many feminist scholars emphasise a relationship, albeit ‘half fastened’, between the descriptive and the substantive component of representation; being female (‘standing for’) is conceived as an enabling condition for the substantive representation of women (‘acting for’). The argument here is simple: women, when present in politics, are more likely to act for women than men. Crucially, though, this is not a guarantee that they will.4 Moreover, this relationship is underpinned not by sex, but by gender—women's shared experiences. Whilst not conceiving of women as a homogenous group, nor of women having an essential identity, women representatives are, nonetheless, considered to share ‘the outward signs of having lived through’ the same experiences;5 where interests are uncyrstallised and/or new to the political agenda, ‘the best way to have one's most important substantive interests represented’ lies with descriptive representatives.6 The late Iris Marion Young7 talked in terms of women's social perspective. This ‘consists in a set of questions, kinds of experience and assumptions with which reasoning begins’; it derives from group members being ‘similarly positioned’ and ‘attuned to particular kinds of social meanings’.