Carole Pateman

Carole Pateman was born on 11 December 1940 in Maresfield, Sussex. She left school at sixteen and later studied at Ruskin College, Oxford, an institution for adult and working-class students, before taking degrees at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She taught political theory at the University of Sydney from 1972 and at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1990, where she is Distinguished Professor Emeritus.

She was the first woman president of the International Political Science Association (1991–1994) and president of the American Political Science Association (2010–2011), was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2007 and received the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science in 2012.

• Participatory democracy. Participation and Democratic Theory (1970) challenged the 'contemporary theory of democracy' of Schumpeter and his successors, which treated low participation as functional for stability. Drawing on Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and G. D. H. Cole, Pateman argued that participation has an educative function: people learn to participate by participating, and develop the sense of political efficacy that democracy needs.
• Democratising the workplace. Because most people spend much of their lives at work, authority structures in industry are crucial sites of political education. She examined evidence from workers' participation schemes and Yugoslav self-management and argued that a participatory society requires democratisation of the workplace.
• Political obligation. The Problem of Political Obligation (1979) argued that liberal theory cannot ground a general obligation to obey the state in consent, and that genuine self-assumed obligation requires participatory democracy.
• The sexual contract. The Sexual Contract (1988) argued that the story of the social contract conceals a prior sexual contract establishing men's 'patriarchal right' over women. Contracts of marriage, employment, prostitution and surrogacy, presented as free exchanges between equals, can create relations of subordination.
• Basic income. In later work she argued that an unconditional basic income would democratise citizenship by freeing people from dependence on employment or on a spouse, giving them the freedom not to be employed.

Pateman is a founding figure for participatory democracy as a design programme. Her claim that participation educates citizens is a standard justification for participatory budgeting, workplace democracy, co-operatives and neighbourhood councils, and it is often tested in research on whether participants in these institutions gain efficacy, knowledge and civic skills.

In 'Participatory Democracy Revisited' (2012) she distinguished participatory democracy, which challenges the structure of authority, from deliberative mini-publics — forums specially commissioned, typically by a government, to deliberate on a subject it chooses — which are usually one-off and consultative. She pointed to participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, where citizens decided on part of the municipal budget, as a lasting participatory institution, and observed that most of the recent expansion of participation 'does not disturb existing institutions'. This distinction remains central in debates about whether citizens' assemblies should advise or decide.

• Feasibility and scale. Critics argue that extensive participation is costly in time, attracts the already engaged, and is hard to extend beyond local or workplace settings.
• Evidence on education. Empirical studies of the educative effects of participation find mixed results, with effects that vary by design and are sometimes modest.
• The sexual contract. Liberal and some feminist critics argue that Pateman's thesis treats contract as inherently subordinating and underestimates how contractual and legal reforms have advanced women's equality.
• Basic income. Some feminists worry that basic income could reinforce a gendered division of labour by subsidising women's withdrawal from paid work.

• Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1970) — Cambridge Core
• The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critical Analysis of Liberal Theory (1979; 2nd ed. 1985)
• The Sexual Contract (1988)
• 'Democratizing Citizenship: Some Advantages of a Basic Income', Politics & Society (2004) — DOI
• 'Participatory Democracy Revisited', Perspectives on Politics (2012) — DOI