Who belongs to the demos? Undemocratic penalties to immigrant minority representation
2026-08-14
Opposition to political candidates who represent ethnic minority interests in Western societies has included calls for undemocratic penalties. Majority groups in democratic societies value democracy in principle, but such support is malleable. We argue that diverse societies lack consensus on who constitutes the “demos”, the imagined political community. When there is a mismatch between a citizen’s understanding of the demos and an officeholder’s background and/or agenda, citizens may be open to imposing undemocratic penalties by reclassifying the offender as a demos-outsider and/or the punishing action as democratic. We tested our expectations with three survey experiments in the US and Switzerland that varied the candidate’s background (majority v. immigrant minority) and agenda (advocating for an age quota v. ethnic diversity quota). Results confirm that citizens do not behave as principled democrats but rather use their understanding of the demos to support or reject undemocratic penalties against minority politicians and policies. Their vision of the demos also determines whether they perceive the candidate as a demos-outsider (not “true” American/Swiss) and his banning as democratic. Interestingly, support for undemocratic penalties is on average higher in Switzerland than in the US, and slight nuances in the empirical results point to certain contextual contingencies of our results. Overall, our cross-country results suggest that people’s understanding of democracy is not based on firm institutional and procedural criteria, but on distinct visions about who belongs, and who does not.