Racism Undermines High-Performance Democracies

Racism is a chronic problem for fifteen of the world’s top scoring democracies (Denmark serves as a case study). This evidence—which we draw from academic research, government and non-government body reports, journalistic reports, and polling data published between 2013 and 2023—troubles doctrines of representative, liberal, electoral, and participatory theories of democracy. In this article, we apply an aspect of Graefrath and Jahn’s ontological coherence rule—this being a comparison of the ontic commitments required by each theory against ontic commitments of racism as defined by the Australian Human Rights Commission—to conceptually demonstrate this claim. This leads us to the conclusion that real-existing democracies experiencing racism are also likely experiencing a constraint on their democratic capacities. Racism, in short, undermines at least four types of democracy. We end our analysis with a suggestion to adapt International IDEA’s 2024 PODS methodology so that it may capture and contrast the opinions of racialized minorities, alongside the opinions of experts, the statistically average person, and other marginalized persons, as the next step in this line of research.