Working Paper 1

Gendering Democratic Consolidation:

Arguments and Some Methodological Issues

Fadhilah Fitri Primandari

fadhilah.primandari@alumni.ui.ac.id

Abstract
Among the many themes that scholars have analysed to explain the lack of women’s gains in democracies,
the gendered aspects of democratic consolidation have largely been understudied. This is unfortunate, as
path dependence studies imply that gendered analyses of democratic consolidation may reveal new
explanations for different socio-political trajectories for women. This essay argues that the lack of gendered
analyses in the consolidation scholarship has to do with the way the term itself was conceptualised and that
conscious efforts must be made to incorporate gender into its frameworks. This critique begins with an
examination of the prominent frameworks in the consolidation scholarship to show how gender has been
largely excluded and follows by outlining the methodological questions that must be answered in the
gendering of the consolidation concept. The methodological problems that the gendering project reveals
must not be taken as a sign to shy away from the endeavour, but rather as reasons for its doing.

Keywords: democracy, democratic consolidation, gender, women’s rights

Introduction

There have been strides and efforts to explain why the establishment of democracy does
not guarantee equal political opportunities for women and the enactment of feminist
policies. Considerable amount of research has been done regarding the dynamics of
democratic transitions (Viterna and Fallon 2008; Waylen 1994; 2007), political cultures
(Inglehart and Norris 2003), and the configuration of formal political institutions (Krook
and Mackay 2011; Mackay, Kenny, and Chappell 2010; Waylen 2007) as part of this
endeavour. Less attention, unfortunately, has been given to the gendered aspects of
democratic consolidation. If we consider the importance of history in shaping political
paths (Thelen and Steinmo 1992; Waylen 2008) and that political cultures, norms, and
behavioural habituation shape the trajectories of new democracies (Fishman 2017, 394–
95), then taking a closer look at how the processes of democratic consolidation are
gendered may reveal new possible explanations for the prevailing gender inequality in
democracies.

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Previous efforts to examine the gendered aspects of democratic consolidation, however,

have been limited. While these efforts have looked into how women were situated
within the terms of transitions and party systems (Waylen 2000; 2007), formal political
institutions (Hassim 2003; Idike 2014), as well as economic structures (Waylen 1998),
they mainly emphasised on formal institutions and their interactions with women’s
organisations. Wider arenas of consolidation have not been systematically gendered.
Additionally, most discussions about the gendered aspects of democratic consolidation
tend to treat the institutionalisation of democratic political systems as rather immediate
events that mainly take place during transitions and/or that, once established, they are
seen as gender-blind conditions with gendered outcomes.

The latter is particularly problematic—we must not equate the institutionalisation of

democratic procedures with the creation of those procedures during transitions.
Institutionalisation goes beyond making a set of rules and principles legal; it entails
making them regular and embedded in people’s day to day lives (Shen 1982, 124). This
requires acceptance from the people at large, as argued by Linz & Stepan (1996)—that
the consolidation of democracy entails arenas beyond democratic formal institutions.
What this means is not only that the process of institutionalisation takes a longer time
than what is needed for the first conduct of elections and initial configuration of political
systems, but also that consequently, when discussing gendered outcomes in
consolidated democracies, this lengthy process within the consolidation timeframe must
be considered as well. It is this process that has yet to be systematically gendered.

The limited exploration of this issue may have to do with the nature of the very concept
of democratic consolidation—feminist political scientists have pointed to the role of
malestream views of politics in the configurations of analytical tools that largely ignore
gender and women in the study of political science (Sawer 2019). Conscious efforts must
be made to deconstruct and reconstruct existing concepts and theories to enable
gendered research and allow us to expose the hidden gendered elements of certain
political phenomena. Given that most studies on democratic consolidation tend to
employ masculine and elitist perspectives that emphasise on the role of past regimes
(Linz and Stepan 1996; Valenzuela 1990), elites’ commitment to play by democratic rules
and institutions (Linz and Stepan 1996; Svolik 2015), and economic factors (Svolik 2008),
deconstructing the concepts of democratic consolidation would be an appropriate
starting point to incorporate gender into the analyses of the consolidation of democracy.

It is this task that this paper attempts to carry out. It begins its critique by examining the
prominent consolidation frameworks, particularly the dimensions and variables that
they claim to be relevant for a democracy’s consolidation, to show how the women
question has been largely excluded and follows with arguments for the incorporation of
gender into the concept. The later part of this essay lays out the methodological

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questions that arise—and that researchers should answer—in order to construct a

workable framework to study the gendered aspects of democratic consolidation.

What this paper conveys is mainly a starting point and clearly nowhere near completion.
The preliminary arguments that it makes aim to shed light on the importance of
considering—and incorporating—gender into the concept and frameworks of
democratic consolidation despite notions of its irrelevance that the early frameworks
seem to imply. This essay shows that perspectives and conceptualisations matter, and
that while the formulation of a certain concept may be useful for the analysis of certain
phenomena, in return it may also exclude some important dimensions. Close
examination, deconstruction, and modification of the concept in question become
necessary to remedy this exclusion. As demonstrated throughout this paper, gender is
one of the important yet excluded dimensions that deserve more attention and
incorporation into our analytical frameworks, particularly those that claim to rest upon
the principle of political inclusivity.

Looking for Women in Democratic Consolidation

First let us delve into the prominent discourse on democratic consolidation. The
consolidation scholarship seems to show preference for narrow definitions of the term—
that is, to use the term to refer to the survival and durability of a democratic regime
(Valenzuela 1990, 4); its unlikelihood to revert to authoritarian rule (Schedler 1998, 66).
Linz and Stepan (1996, 5) defined a consolidated democracy as a political situation in
which ‘democracy has become the only game in town’—that no other political regimes
are perceived as more preferable to democracy. Przeworski et al (2000) referred to it as
the institutionalisation of uncertainty, as, unlike the conduct of politics in authoritarian
regimes which usually allows less chances for the opposition to gain power, in a
democracy there must be a probability for the incumbent to lose in elections. An
important part of consolidation is the acceptance and habituation of members of the
polity to the democratic procedures and outcomes. Additionally, any political dispute
that arise must be resolved through democratic institutions rather than the overthrow of
the sitting government (Linz and Stepan 1996, 5).

How does one recognise a consolidated democracy when they see one? Several tests
have been argued to be appropriate for this task. One is the ‘transfer of power test’,
which looks at whether a government has held an election—after a democratic regime’s
first or founding election—and been defeated, and peacefully accepted its defeat and
transferred its power onto the electoral winner (Beetham 1994, 160). This test is meant to
ensure the legitimacy of the established democratic rules and the winners that they
produce. A similar method is to look at how long a democracy remains intact after the
completion of a democratic transition. The exact minimum time for this measurement,

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however, is still being debated. Some argue that a democracy must survive for a
minimum of 10 to 12 years while others favour a longer duration of regular electoral
competition, such as a minimum of 25 years, as a requirement for declaring a democracy
as a consolidated one (see Power and Gasiorowski 1997).

However, longevity and election cycles alone are not sufficient to determine a
democracy’s durability (Schedler 2001, 73). A democracy must be tested against shocks
to prove that it can hold up against conditions that favour the emergence—or re-
emergence—of doubts among the elites and public regarding democracy’s capacity to
solve the severe problems and how determined and strong the antidemocrats are
(Schedler 2001, 73). Another ‘negative’ test that has been argued for is that of
Valenzuela’s (1990), which measures the likelihood for consolidation by asking whether
the democracy in question exhibits at least one of the four perverse elements that pose
threats to democratic rule: tutelary powers, reserve domains of authority and
policymaking, major discriminations in the electoral process, and the lack of centrality
of elections as avenue to political office.

More maximalist measurements of democratic consolidation look into spaces beyond

formal democratic institutions, arguing that commitments to democracy must not only
be held by political elites, but also the general masses—unlike authoritarian rule, in
essence a democracy must include the active participation of its citizens. This approach
examines whether anti-democratic values and behaviours could be found in the masses;
while such behaviours may be quite evident among elites, such as transgressions of
authority and suppression of political opponents, they may not be as noticeable among
the masses as they may appear less prominent. Despite their lack of prominence, they
may contribute indirectly to the process of consolidation or deconsolidation. Signs of
anti-democratic values and behaviour that have been most commonly looked for include
the use of violence and rejection of elections and/or attempts to overthrow the elected
government (Schedler 2001, 70–71). In recognition of these more maximalist
perspectives, scholars have made conscious efforts to map the varying dimensions of
democratic consolidation, most identifying them as the institutional and/or
constitutional, attitudinal, and behavioural dimensions (see for example Linz and Stepan
1996; Merkel 1998; Puhle 2005; Schedler 1998). Linz and Stepan (1996, 7) pointed to five
specific arenas in which these dimensions are spread across: 1) civil society; 2) political
society; 3) rule of law; 4) state apparatus; and 5) economic state. However, even in these
maximalist views the question of women’s position in politics was not explicitly asked.

Similarly, and perhaps consequently, the absence of the women—and more widely,
gender—question was also evident in explanations on how a democracy becomes
consolidated. Linz and Stepan’s (1996) analysis, for example, which followed their
arguments about the legacy of previous regime types in shaping modes of transitions,
pointed to the effects that non-democratic pasts have on a democratic regime’s prospects

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for consolidation. Totalitarian regimes, which penetrate deep into the society, pose more
severe obstacles to consolidation than those by authoritarian regimes, which impose less
control at the micro or individual level (Linz and Stepan 1996, 55–56). The characteristic
of the military and their position in the previous regime has also been argued to matter;
the more hierarchical the military is, the stronger is its ability to set the terms of its
withdrawal from the government and reserve non-democratic domains in the newly
formed democratic regime (Linz and Stepan 1996, 67).

Economic explanations, which followed prior arguments about the importance of

economic development for regime legitimacy, have also been prominent. It has been
argued that because economic development favours democratic promotion, then it could
be inferred that it is also favourable for consolidation (Gasiorowski and Power 1998,
744). Svolik (2008) also found that the timing of democratic regime breakdowns between
1787-2001 had strong associated with economic recessions. The prominence of economic
arguments has been challenged however; for example, Mainwaring & Pérez-Linán
(2013) found that the people’s normative preferences for democracy in Latin America
were able to sustain democracy during economic crises. What matters is not economic
crises per se, but whether or not they affect people’s perceptions of democracy
(Mainwaring and Pérez-Linán 2013). According to this theory, democratic attitudes
among the masses—or lack thereof—matter more; without active and robust support
from the people, a democracy is at risk of becoming one that is defective, rather than
consolidated (Merkel 1998, 57). Going further, scholars have also argued that culture
shapes democratic prospects; it has been said that predominantly Protestant societies
facilitate the emergence and sustainability of democracy more than other faiths
(Gasiorowski and Power 1998, 744).

Another common theme in the consolidation framework has been the institutional or
government configuration of a democratic regime. Early proponents of this theme
argued that presidential systems tend to be less stable than parliamentary ones,
especially when the democratic regime in question employs a multiparty system (see,
for example, Linz 1990). Power and Gasiorowski’s (1997) study of new democracies in
the Third World, however, disproved this argument. Challenging theories about the
destabilising effects of multiparty systems and the diverse actors they involve, some
have also contended that the multiparty system is, in fact, conducive to a democracy’s
consolidation precisely because it includes and thus accommodates more actors and
demands into public decision-making (Power and Gasiorowski 1997, 147).

The above overview of the common themes examined within the consolidation
scholarship shows that frameworks employed in the field have mainly referred to
political elites, parties, as well as groups perceived as able to employ violence—such as
the military—as relevant actors for a democracy’s consolidation. These positions, to date,
have been dominated by men. While it may seem that the maximalist perspectives

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would allow more room for the analysis of women as they inspect arenas beyond formal
politics, such discussions have often regarded the masses in very generalising terms,
overlooking their gendered aspects. The gendered inspections of equal political
participation have been close to non-existent in the dominant democratic consolidation
frameworks.

At a glance, the lack of analyses on gender may look normal and reasonable—the
consolidation concept was, after all, made against the backdrop of authoritarian
reversals and was originally meant to be used in analyses on democracies’ sustainability
(Schedler 1998). However, I argue that such views risk overlooking the ‘process’ element
that contributes to a democracy’s consolidation; a democracy’s state of being ‘secure’ is
built off the ‘locking in’ of certain values, norms, attitudes, and behaviours. While the
definition of democratic consolidation itself does not make explicit reference to gender,
the processes that lead up to the empirical realisation of the concept involve aspects that
are gendered. When certain political values, norms, attitudes, and behaviours are
‘locked in’, leading a democracy to be deemed as ‘secure’, so are the gendered aspects of
those dimensions. It is the gendered process of a democracy’s consolidation that this
essay calls for us to pay more attention to.

The lack of gender analyses within the democratic consolidation framework may also
have to do with the malestream conceptions and measurements of democracy. Although
democracy claims to uphold gender equality especially in terms of political participation
(Lovenduski 2019, 18), the concept itself was initially conceptualised as a system that
favours men and centres around men’s experiences the public sphere (Pateman 1988;
Sawer 2019). Pateman (1988) analysed that women were not part of the original social
contract, but were instead subjected under the sexual contract. In these arrangements,
civil freedom was considered a masculine attribute; political rights were recognised to
belong to men (Pateman 1988, 2). Although modern conceptions of liberal democracy
have moved to incorporate female suffrage in its understanding of political rights, there
is a still a discrepancy between the inclusive democratic ideals championed by
normative theories of democracy and their operationalisations in the making of
workable conceptual frameworks. Paxton (2008) demonstrated this in her examination
of methods employed in prominent empirical research on democracy. She found that
although democracy in principle is gendered, women were not always included in their
measurements and that measuring women’s political participation and regarding it as a
prerequisite for democracy would adjust the democratisation timeline for many
countries (Paxton 2008, 48, 56–57). Furthermore, the empirical absence of women in
formal politics despite the recognition of women’s suffrage and formal political rights
has not always been addressed seriously by governments.

Here we see that the absence of women in politics, both in practice and knowledge, has
been seldom questioned and rather treated as the norm (Sawer 2019, 17). One might

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argue that this lack of questioning was appropriate due to women’s lack of contributions
to major political events thus rendering them irrelevant to these processes, but studies
have shown this assumption to be false. Waylen’s (2007) extensive study of the
transitions in Latin American countries and South Africa showed that women were
active during protests pushing for reforms and contributed to the institutional
arrangements after the collapse of the previous regimes. Moving further back, historical
accounts have noted Egyptian women mobilising alongside men against the British
occupation to fight for independence (Kamal 2016, 4). During the Arab Uprisings and
demand for democratic reforms in Egypt and Tunisia, women took to the streets in large
numbers and played a large role in encouraging more people to protest against the
incumbent authoritarian regime (Landorf 2014; Manea 2014). To say that women were
not present during these times is an indication of how women have been rendered
invisible in democratic studies not because of their absence, but because the malestream
views of politics have refused to pay closer attention to the gendered aspects of
democratic trajectories.

As malestream views of politics have played part in the exclusion of women from
analyses of political phenomena, we cannot fully rely on the frameworks that these
views have constructed if we wish to find comprehensive explanation on women in
politics. Conscious efforts must be first made to incorporate women into these
frameworks. This process is complex, as the following sections explicate.

To Gender or Not to Gender the Consolidation Concept

Following Mazur and Goertz (2008, 7), the task of gendering concepts and theories is
challenging as it cannot be carried out simply by ‘adding gender and stir’; it involves
dealing with the dilemmas that are strongly linked with the foundations of the concepts
and theories that we wish to modify. The consolidation concept presents us with many
of such dilemmas, and we must attempt to answer them before we can move onto the
concept’s gendered modification and operationalisation. It is to these complex questions
that we now turn.

The first question asks whether or not the mission to gender the concept of democratic
consolidation is itself legitimate. One might argue that we must not inflate the concept
of democratic consolidation (Schedler 1998, 103) to include the gender question because
it was meant to address the questions regarding democratic regression or reversals to
authoritarian rule. At face value, this may sound plausible, however, going by this
argument would push us to depart from the very principles of inclusive politics that the
concept of democracy itself seems to take pride in—the argument for elections itself rests
upon the principle of inclusivity and the wish to move away from power monopoly by
a single person or class or group, is it not?

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An acceptance of the inclusivity principle would further push us to question the

‘democratic practice habituation’ that the dominant concepts and theories of democratic
consolidation deem as important. Which democratic practices are then meant to be
relevant? The phrase ‘accepting democracy as the only game in town’ should also receive
attention; what kind of democracy and whose game is it? When we speak of the need to
spot and mitigate the threats of non-democratic behaviour, what do we consider as non-
democratic? Can we say that efforts to steer women out of politics constitute as non-
democratic behaviour that we should look out for, or are we only to focus on whether
the ruling elites refuse to commit to peaceful transitions of power? One cannot
sufficiently argue that democracy in principle upholds political inclusion and equality—
that include women—but refuse to address the gender question when discussing its
consolidation and conveniently ask us to focus mainly on the regularity of electoral
contestations.

The second concerns whether the gendering of the democratic consolidation concept is
necessary, or whether there are other concepts that may also get us to a gendered
analysis of democracy. One might be concerned with the exclusion of gender from
dominant theories of democracy but still agree that the conceptualisation of democratic
consolidation should be kept as is; that the issue of gender equality and women’s
exclusion from politics is better discussed within the study of democratic deepening.
Heller (2009, 141) has argued, democratic consolidation and democratic deepening
should be regarded as distinct concepts. This distinction points to democratic deepening
as a concept that emphasises on quality once the issue of ‘regime installation’ is no longer
a concern (Schedler 1998, 94–95). Under this premise, the issue of women’s political
participation is irrelevant to the consolidation project.

Again, this argument is convincing, if only questions on the lack of women in politics
and slow progress for gender equality in democracies (see numbers in Inter-
Parliamentary Union 2020) can be dealt with by simply focusing on events that happen
after transitions are complete and democratic consolidation has been considered to be
achieved. Studies have shown that this is not the case. Waylen (1994; 2000; 2007) argued
that transitions to democracy are gendered; the characteristics of the previous
authoritarian regime and the ability of women’s movements to influence institutional
arrangements during democratisation shape the transition’s gendered outcomes. Walsh
(2011; 2012) showed that open and inclusive debates during democratic transitions
favour the advancement of women’s rights after democratisation, while opposite
conditions limit feminist discourse. The issue of gender in democracy thus should not
be seen as only relevant once a minimalist form of democracy has been installed—its
instalment in itself is already gendered. It is a matter of whether one takes interest in
revealing these gendered aspects.

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As we have seen earlier, Linz and Stepan’s (1996) argument that types of previous
authoritarian regimes and pacts form paths for democratic trajectories also highlighted,
the importance of history. If we accept this path dependence approach, then we should
accept the premise that history matters for the occurrence of the present and future and,
consequently, that the consolidation of democracy must be achieved before the
deepening of democracy begins. In other words, we must agree that the process of
democratic consolidation shapes the successes, or shortcomings, of democratic
deepening. Thus, if we are expecting to comprehensively deal with the question of
gender within the study of democratic deepening, we must first gender how we make
sense of democratic consolidation.

Another argument against designating women’s political participation and position as

issues to be discussed only under the study of democratic deepening is that it implies
that the gender question is a secondary concern. It regards women’s political
participation mainly as a democratic quality that is measured in a spectrum rather than
a prerequisite to be fulfilled for a polity to enjoy the label of democracy. This, as we have
seen previously, is problematic—there is no justification to exclude gender from our
analysis of democratic consolidation if we agree that democracy upholds and champions
gender equality in principle. But further, even if we want to refer women’s participation
in democracies as a quality that democrats aspire for and an issue to be inspected mainly
in studies of democratic deepening rather than a requirement for democracy, conceptual
frameworks for democratic deepening also do not clearly indicate when we can begin to
consistently ask the question of women—works on democratic consolidation are not in
consensus regarding the minimum timeframes in which we should test a democracy’s
durability (see Beetham 1994; Power and Gasiorowski 1997).

I argue that questions regarding women’s access to politics cannot wait until a
democracy is considered consolidated not only because it is unclear when we should
start doing so but also, following Paxton (2008), doing so would perpetuate the
methodological discrepancy between conceptual definitions and measurements of
democracy. Thus, the question of women’s political participation and rights in
democracies should be rigorously asked from the very time a democracy is installed, and
this installation should be recognised only when women have gained formal rights to
political participation (Dahl 1998; Paxton 2008, 65). In other words, the consolidation of
democracy is gendered, and we must rethink of the ways we have understood the
concept and its dimensions in order to gender our empirical research on its phenomena.

Methodological Tasks to Solve

Now, we deal with how we can gender our analysis of democratic consolidation. Let us
return to the three main dimensions conventionally examined and said to measure a

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democracy’s consolidation: regular conduct of elections across time, the ability to

withstand crises, and the habituation of democratic norms and practices (see, among
others, Beetham 1994; Linz and Stepan 1996; Power and Gasiorowski 1997; Schedler
2001). From these three dimensions, it seems that the habituation dimension allows more
room for the gendering of the democratic consolidation concept. We should then ask,
how is the habituation of ‘democratic’ norms and behaviours gendered? Which norms
and behaviours, precisely, are habituated—and how do they relate to women’s positions
in society? Whose norms and behaviours, and where?

I argue that the scope of examinations of ‘democratic norms and behaviour’ should not
be limited to those of the elite; we must include those exhibited by the masses as well.
This is not only to maintain consistency with the notion that politics takes place in realms
beyond formal institutions (McAuley 2003, 3), but also that democracy, in principle,
champions itself on the inclusion of the demos. To limit the examination of democratic
norms and practices to those of the elite or ruling class would imply that only the elites
matter, going against the normative principle that the people lies at the heart of
democracy.

The next question is through what units or mediums we can observe and measure the
gendered aspects of democratic norms and behaviours. Here we can take inspiration
from studies that have looked into not only laws and their legislation process, but also
political culture. Scholars of the latter have employed both quantitative and qualitative
methods in their analyses, although those who mainly focused on quantitative
methods—analysing voting behaviour and preferences for certain political systems—
have been criticised as they risk dismissing the collective and historical aspect that the
concept of ‘culture’ carries (Gendzel 1997). Some have preferred to look into meanings
and discourse, by examining the contents and targets of political campaigns, messages
and methods of political recruitment, as well as public or group reactions to more
specific policy ideas or political events (see Voinea and Neumann 2020). These units or
mediums are not exhaustive, and the ways one can configure their measurements would
be too many and granular to be covered in this short preliminary essay. Whichever
method that one opts for and whichever units they choose to closely examine, the
question of gender must be constantly asked throughout the research process—for
example, when studying the contents of political campaigns as part of the gendering
project, one must ask how gender issues and roles are included and situated within those
contents.

Gendering what the democratic habituation dimension consists of, however, is only one
portion of the gendering process. We are now faced with the question of how to position
and use the gendered habituation dimension in our research. The first option is to
measure these dimensions to see the degree of inclusiveness or how egalitarian the
process of democratic consolidation in a certain country is. For example, we can say that

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a certain democratic country’s consolidation process is not women-friendly, or that it is

inclusive for women, based on our measurements. For this option, we adopt the
established definition of consolidation, and mainly gender what consolidation consists
of. This mode of ‘gendering’ may be preferable if we wish to analyse how a democracy’s
consolidation process affects or shapes a certain outcome. However, although this
method may be more efficient when working with causal mechanisms, it has the
problem of conceding to the dismissal of the intrinsic importance of gender for the
concept if we later on find that the process of consolidation largely excluded women. To
put it more simply, can we still say that a consolidation—of norms and culture—is
democratic if the very norms that it is made out of marginalised women?

The second option caters to this dilemma, but in return it makes it challenging to
incorporate the gendered concept of democratic consolidation into causal analyses.
Different from the first option, which measures the level of inclusiveness or women-
friendliness of a country’s democratic consolidation, the second option treats the inclusion
of women in political processes as a prerequisite for consolidation. In other words, one
cannot refer to a regime as being democratically consolidated if what is politically
habituated does not include women. This would entail attaching an entirely new
meaning to the concept which, although it does emphasise on the importance of
consistency by positioning the inclusion of women as a necessary element for democratic
phenomena, may be too extreme. Its consistency may sacrifice the concept’s own
applicability. Until this day, arguably no democratic regime has fulfilled all the ideals
expected by normative principles of democracy. Employing a fully maximalist and
dichotomous approach would leave us to say that no democracy has been consolidated
until this day (Valenzuela 1990, 6). Additionally, fully changing the meaning of an
existing concept may not be effective for the concept’s proliferation and acceptance,
especially when the previously established concept has already been widely accepted
and used (Goertz and Mazur 2008, 24).

One way the issue between these two options might be solved is by focusing on the
instalment and securing of democracy as a system of governance when we speak of
democratic consolidation, therefore separating it from democracy as a societal norm and
culture (Chipkin 2007; Heller 2009). This would mean that the scope of the gendering
project mainly applies to the democratic system of governance, perhaps saving us from
the dilemma of having to examine the societal discourse and culture at large.
Unfortunately, this, too, gives us more questions to answer. For example, what do we
mean by a ‘democratic system’? A narrow definition would point to the conduct of
elections as its main mode of political participation, but if we do not gender our
understanding of elections and how candidates are nominated, then we are at risk of
dismissing the possibility that these electoral contestations may not be free for every
citizen. If women at large are structurally barred from voting and running for office,
despite formal recognition of their political rights, can we still say the system—both in

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terms of its origin and product—is democratic? If it is not, we cannot say that a country
has undergone democratic consolidation—even if we want to say that the system is
‘secure’, the consolidation that it has experienced must be a consolidation of something
else. Secondly, purely focusing on the arrangements that make up and take place in
formal institutions would be inconsistent with even the mainstream frameworks of
democratic consolidation that recognise both the political and civil society as arenas of
consolidation (see Linz and Stepan 1996).

At the heart of the problems discussed above is the question of what it means to be
democratic, and one’s endeavour to gender the concept of consolidation must begin by
answering this question. While minimalist conceptions tend to constrict our scope of
analysis, limiting our exploration women’s roles and experiences, maximalist
perspectives do not save us from facing methodological issues either, as this section has
demonstrated. The search for an ultimate answer to these issues and decision on which
options we must privilege, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. In fact, I think it
is unwise to claim one blanket and absolute correct answer to such questions; research
is an incomplete and always ongoing endeavour, and our knowledge and perspectives
will continuously evolve. Thus, the questions and issues that the previous passages have
outlined are not exhaustive. Here, I echo Goertz’ (2006) advice, that one should choose
their options based on the purpose that their research project serves and wishes to
accomplish, and any choice made must be explicitly communicated.

Conclusion

This essay serves as a starting point to closely examine the gendered aspects of
democratic consolidation. It contends that the consolidation of democracy is gendered,
and thus our conceptual understanding of it must be too. As the readily constructed
frameworks have proven to be inadequate for analyses on the gendered aspects of
democratic consolidation, our endeavour to study these aspects must begin by
deconstructing and gendering the established frameworks and their dimensions before
we can employ them as our analytical tools. This paper lays out some of the
methodological questions that one would encounter when they take on this task. These
questions, however, should not be taken as signs to avoid and shy away from gendering
the consolidation concept, but rather as indications that there are problems left
unanswered by previous studies that we must solve. To shy away from solving these
questions would not only mean taking part in perpetuating the methodological
discrepancies between democracy’s normative principles and their operationalisations,
but also leaving the gap between gendered theories of democratic transitions and
deepening unaddressed.

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