Participation and representation: the people with disabilities in the arenas of power

Abstract

This article aims to highlight the importance that the occupation of elective posts and deliberative arenas by people with disabilities exerts in the promotion of public policies, which have the issue of inclusion as their central core, whether through groupings by social movements, through acting in deliberative councils or while covered by electoral authorization. This is a theoretical essay derived from an integrative literature review, which made use of classic authors in the analysis of the process of political representation in contemporary democracies, taking as scenario the bases and national legal frameworks about the rights of people with disabilities enacted in the Brazil and in the world. The text begins its notes by demarcating the historical importance operated when the activist transformation of the concept of disability as espoused through the prism of social production, a discourse that allows us to think about the performance of people with disabilities in terms of political protagonism. It concludes by highlighting that the most significant advances in terms of public policies for people with disabilities occurred precisely when the concatenation of pressure exerted by social movements, deliberative councils and parliamentarians with disabilities, which stands out as a fundamental fact that people with disabilities occupy these spaces and arenas in order to interfere in the making of public agendas that see the transformation of social structures as a central part of making an accessible and fair world.