Gender, Democratic Participation And Deliberation

The political ability of individuals or groups affected to their benefits demands and actual status in the social power system directly. Whether or not the grass-roots women and men have the same or similar ability in management and decision-making? In general situations, most people would deny this. However, our study considers Wenling Democratic Consultation as a system design whose framework is based on Deliberative Democracy theory, and imitates a "Initial Position" with the gender perspective, thus successfully isolate political ability into the potential part and the actual one: The former emerges when we fade the traditional gender system which put women and men into different fields (public and private) at the premise, and give women the equal opportunities of participation and speaking rights. According to the questionnaire data comparison, women have the similar political potential with men in concerning and knowing on public affairs, understanding and learning on public knowledge, preferences and identification on public decision; the latter revert back to reality system, our scene observation and personal interviews show that, women more negatively participate during the real negotiations process and more difficultly express willing than men outside. In fact, Democratic Consultation is not universal one in the grass-roots democracy form, even if it is specially designed, it is difficult to divest the well-established social macro-environment and sex roles for women by history and society completely. In our study, we found there is always a pair of contradictions between the political potential and actual ability among female groups. The reason that they always don't have the equal political energy while they are no worse in political potential in fact, not only because of the defects from themselves, but also the multiple constraints from external environment, as well as the defects of design and implementation of legal or policy system. So, we advocate to protect women's political participation by affirmative actions, give some policy proposals to improve the system design and procedural details; Further more, spread the successful experience and recommendations of Democratic Consultation to a wider range of grass-roots democracy form, create a favorable external environment for women's political participation, improve their general quality, make them to play a positive role in local governance by various social organizations, and actively promote women's political participation.