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Popular consensus holds that if 'enough women' are present in political institutions they will represent 'women's interests,' however, such generalized assumptions are frequently queried on theoretical grounds and consistently shown to be conditional in practice. In this text, Karen Celis and Sarah Childs address women's poverty of political representation with a feminist account of democratic representation. Celis and Childs rethink and redesign representative institutions, taking ideological and intersectional differences as their starting point.

Popular consensus holds that if 'enough women' are present in political institutions they will represent 'women's interests,' however, such generalized assumptions are frequently queried on theoretical grounds and consistently shown to be conditional in practice. In this text, Karen Celis and Sarah Childs address women's poverty of political representation with a feminist account of democratic representation. Celis and Childs rethink and redesign representative institutions, taking ideological and intersectional differences as their starting point.

Feminist democratic representation is a new design for women's group representation in electoral politics. We build on the design principles and practices of the 1990s' presence theorists, who conceived of political inclusion as the presence of descriptive representatives and advocated for gender quota. Our second-generation design foregrounds women's ideological and intersectional heterogeneity, and details a representative process that enacts three feminist principles: inclusiveness, responsiveness and egalitarianism. A new set of actors – the affected representatives of women – play formal, institutionalised roles in two new democratic practices: group advocacy and account giving. Together, these augmentations incentivise new attitudes and behaviours among elected representatives, and bring about multiple representational effects that redress the poverty of women's political representation: elected representatives now know more, care more and are more connected to diverse women, including the most marginalised; and the represented are now more closely connected with, more interested in and better represented through democratic politics.

Gender inequality in political representation remains despite widespread and long-standing feminist campaigns for representative equality. This article suggests that in order to increase our understanding of why men's over-representation in politics persists, gender equality in descriptive and substantive representation should be analysed as power struggles. Power is operationalised as positional power and active power, and struggle as the interaction between feminist strategies and resistance. The article offers a rereading of the scholarship on gender equality and political representation through the lens of power struggles and concludes with highlighting some future research tracks.

The recent finding that right-wing parties increasingly make efforts to integrate women's concerns raises questions as to whether ideology still counts as a reliable indicator for women's substantive representation and how different party contexts shape opportunities for the articulation of women's interests. This article therefore critically reassesses how ideology defines the opportunities for women's substantive representation, based on a comparative study of legislators' acting on behalf of women in 14 European countries. We argue that ideology still offers an important explanation for women's substantive representation, but that the link between the two should be conceptualized as complex rather than straightforward. The role of ideology is best understood if scholars (1) adopt an understanding of 'ideology' that allows for more variation and is conceptually different from 'party', (2) differentiate between gendered interests and feminist interests and (3) understand the impact of ideology as both direct and mediated.