15 High-Performance Democracies with documented accounts of Racism per Country
Description
This dataset offers documentary evidence of racism for 15 countries (top performing democracies in the 2022-23 period). This is done to demonstrate the prevalence of racism as a chronic problem for, and with recent presentations in, the world’s high performing democracies. Accounts of racism are divided into the following categories of document types: (1) Academic research, (2) Government body reports, (3) Non-government body reports, (4) journalistic reports, and (5) non-academic polling/opinion surveys, to ensure a diversity of evidentiary claims per county. Up to 10 accounts have been provided for each category, as this was the upward limit of our Research Assistance funding. In no case is this an exhaustive listing even though, for some categories (such as government reports from Costa Rica) we did not reach 10 accounts. Further research with new funding is required to build on this work. The data is provided alphabetically per country in tables. Attribution: Jean-Paul Gagnon, Seema Shah, and Blake Kelly. 2025. "15 High-Performance Democracies with documented accounts of Racism per Country". V1. [DOI or hyperlink to Mendeley page] Associated publication: Jean-Paul Gagnon, Seema Shah, Blake Kelly. 2025. "Racism Undermines High Performance Democracies". Chinese Political Science Review. Forthcoming. Abstract below. Racism Undermines High-Performance Democracies Abstract. 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. Keywords. Democracy, Racism, Liberalism, Elections, Representation, Participation.
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Steps to reproduce
A note on method used for selecting documents. First: create a table of key terms from the Australian Human Rights Commission's (AHRC) definition of racism with nested sub-concepts for each term (this is done to avoid extreme rigidity around terms and Giovanni Sartori’s ladder of abstraction – focus on descending the ladder – is helpful here to determine sub-concepts otherwise termed conceptions). Second: read and annotate a candidate document about, say, racism in Ireland or Finland and then highlight key terms for this document (this at times requires academic judgment as some documents may not use the word ‘racism’ but are still addressing the concept through other language – we decided, however, to avoid this clause for this study). Third: match terms between the AHRC table and the document’s key words. This can be done using software (though this may not be as accurate), manually through computer files (our approach), or by hand with printed pages. Fourth: if one or more key words match, or if a term in the document is justifiably referring to closely related sub-concepts nested in the AHRC definition, then the document meets the criterion for inclusion. Step four is reliant on interpretation and, whilst we expect different teams may not include exactly the documents we rely upon for this study, we would expect overlap between research teams for most documents were others to reproduce this method. Please contact Jean-Paul Gagnon (jean-pail.gagnon@canberra.edu.au) if you are facing any trouble with reproducing the selection method.