The role of feminist transformative leadership for democratic improvement: learnings from Mexico’s political parity

Overview

In 2019, Mexico achieved a significant political consensus: a constitutional reform established gender-political parity at the executive, legislative, and judicial powers at federal, state, and municipal levels. By October 2024, Mexico had its first woman president. In this context, we aim to examine whether, and in what ways, democracy is transformed when feminist women hold public office. The central question is how a feminist transformative leadership can improve democracy. Building on democratic critical theory, we conceptualise democratic improvement as the exercise of democratic practices and their instalment in public institutions. First, we define democratic practices as: (1) the strengthening of political pluralism, (2) the increase in women’s civic engagement that emerged since the 2019 constitutional reform, and (3) the diversity of women’s leadership in positions of power. In this article, we trace the development of Mexico’s democratic systems that took place in tandem with women’s assertion of their political rights. Second, drawing on Aúna’s accompaniment model, we propose theoretical archetypes of women leaders in Mexico and contrast these with characteristics of feminist transformative leadership. Third, acknowledging that democratic improvement is not solely tied to feminist transformative leadership, we discuss how political parties might hinder women’s full participation in political life. Finally, as part of the conclusion, we warn against placing women leaders on ‘glass cliffs’, expecting them to be saviours of democracy; we discuss the dangers of unnuanced examinations of the performance of women leaders.