“Democracy” game: recall elections in a context of structural gender inequality in Peru

Democracy is a very broad concept and can be classified or manifested in diverse ways as representative, direct and participatory democracy, or even radical, organic or totalitarian democracy, and so on. Are elections a synonym of democracy? It is widely understood that even though elections are an instrument of representative democracy, they do not define a country as democratic. In the same way, even though the goal of the democratic mechanism of recall election is to remove authorities when citizens are not satisfied with their management, it can also be applied in an anti-democratic way, or be contradictory to the spirit of representative democracy, as the wish of the majority can be overthrown by a minority. Several studies of different currents of thought re-veal that democracy has several limitations that affect governance, relations between society and State, and among diverse actors of society. Feminist theory gives us a different perspective to analyse democracy and citizenship. For instance, a society that is not equitable in its gender structure, transfers certain conditions to democracy -and democratic mechanisms- that not only will reinforce and maintain that inequality, but also will establish a complex application of those tools. This paper attempts to analyse -with feminist lenses- the recall process against Susana Villarán, the first woman elected as mayor of Lima, framed within Peru’s democratization in the last two decades.