In 2021, two women announced they would run for the Australian federal parliament as job-sharing MPs. While their candidacy was ultimately abandoned, the “Better Together” experiment casts light on tensions between representative theory and democratic conventions on the one hand, and the contemporary challenges of being a member of parliament on the other. These questions, which can be classified as theoretical, structural and experiential, are worthy of further examination. Must a representative be a single individual? Could a Westminster democratic system such as Australia’s accommodate job-sharing MPs in parliament? Could a job-sharing model deliver effective, or even better, representation for constituents? Finally, how could job-sharing help MPs overcome some of the challenges that create barriers to representation, particularly for women and minority cohorts? Taking this democratic experiment seriously helps us think through contemporary challenges of representation.
