Women, public space, political participation and human rights: towards a parity democracy paradigm?

Abstract

This article analyses the extent to which human rights have supported a paradigmatic change in the conception of women’s political participation. It describes human rights evolutions after the Second World War as framing a phase in which the lack of women’s political participation in conditions of equality was perceived as a matter of equal rights, first under a logic of formal equality and then, as from the eighties and the adoption of CEDAW, as a matter of equal opportunities under a logic of substantive equality. The third section describes the steps that have been taken towards a new paradigm in the world of human rights since the mid-1990s which conceptualizes the absence of women in the public sphere (broadly conceived) in terms of democratic legitimacy and not just of equality (formal or substantive). The fourth section, coinciding more or less with the beginning of the new century, identifies international and, more importantly, regional signs of the consolidation of the framework of parity democracy as a new paradigm through which to assess the importance of the political participation of women.