Improving Candidate-Quality Preference-Specification Mechanisms : Incorporating (Gender-Empowering) Voter-Chosen Quotas

I conceptualise the informal outlines of a new voting system / mechanism that is more holistic and democratically just – the proposed alternative would incorporate (gender) quotas amongst other fundamental, important aspects. The conceptual outline seeks to resolve the primary (intellectual) obstacles for the adoption of quotas in their current form which, I contend, is their discordance with mainstream conceptions of democratic justice. More precisely, the conceptualised voting system / mechanism seeks to increase the sophistication of preference-specification in voting procedures (thereby presenting an alternative to the prevailing, privileged paradigm of geospatial-constituency representation). I do not present results in the conventional sense – no data was analysed, no experiments run and no software implemented. A rationale is provided for why this proposed voting system / mechanism, in addition to potentially solving / tackling some problems identified by feminist scholarship, could also solve an even larger class of fundamental political and democratic problems related to intersectionality (e.g. race, ethnicity, income, class, caste, disability, sexuality, education, age, occupation etc.) through enhancing the translation, representation and implementation of voters’ interests. In terms of conclusions within the paper, they are largely intermediate conclusions as they relate to the investigation of problems as well as the informal conceptual outline of the proposed voting system / mechanism