Freedom in the World


Freedom in the World is a yearly survey and report by the U.S.-based and U.S. government funded non-governmental organization Freedom House that measures the degree of civil liberties and political rights in every nation and significant related and disputed territories around the world.

Origin and use

Freedom in the World was launched in 1973 by Raymond Gastil. It produces annual scores representing the levels of political rights and civil liberties in each state and territory, on a scale from 1 to 7. Depending on the ratings, the nations are then classified as "Free", "Partly Free", or "Not Free". The report is often used by researchers in order to measure democracy and correlates highly with several other measures of democracy such as the Polity data series.
The Freedom House rankings are widely reported in the media and used as sources by political researchers. Their construction and use has been [|evaluated by critics and supporters].

Country rankings

The rankings below are from the Freedom in the World 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 surveys, each reflecting findings covering the previous year. Each pair of political rights and civil liberties ratings is averaged to determine an overall status of "Free", "Partly Free", or "Not Free".
An asterisk indicates countries which are "electoral democracies". To qualify as an "electoral democracy", a state must have satisfied the following criteria:
  1. A competitive, multiparty political system;
  2. Adult suffrage for all citizens without criminal convictions ;
  3. Regularly contested elections conducted in conditions of ballot secrecy, reasonable ballot security, and the absence of massive voter fraud that yields results that are unrepresentative of the public will; and
  4. Significant public access of major political parties to the electorate through the media and through generally open political campaigning.
An electoral democracy must have a score of 7 or more out of 12 in political rights subcategory A, an overall aggregate score of 20 in their political rights rating and an overall aggregate score of 30 in their civil liberties rating.
Freedom House's term "electoral democracy" differs from "liberal democracy" in that the latter also implies the presence of a substantial array of civil liberties. In the survey, all Free countries qualify as both electoral and liberal democracies. By contrast, some Partly Free countries qualify as electoral, but not liberal, democracies.

World

Related and disputed territories

Trends

According to Freedom House, a quarter of all declines of freedom in the world in 2016 took place in Europe.
Percentage of countries in each category, from the 1973 through 2014 reports:
Year
Free
Partly
Free
Not
Free
Electoral
Democracies
197541 48 63 —
198051 54 56 —
198553 59 55 —
199061 44 62 69
199576 61 54 113
200085 60 47 120
200589 54 49 119
201089 58 47 116
201187 60 47 115
201287 60 48 117
201390 58 47 117
201488 59 48 122
201589 55 51 125
201686 59 50 125
201787 59 49 123

Sources: Country Status and ratings overview 1973–2016, Number and percentages of electoral democracies 1989–2016, Freedom in the World 2018 report covering 2017.
Notes:
There is some debate over the neutrality of Freedom House and the methodology used for the Freedom in the World report, which has been written by Raymond D. Gastil and his colleagues. The neutrality and biases of human-rights indices have been discussed in several publications by Kenneth A. Bollen. Bollen wrote that "Considered together these criticisms suggest that some nations may have been incorrectly rated on Gastil's measures. However, none of the criticisms have demonstrated a systematic bias in all the ratings. Most of the evidence consists of anecdotal evidence of relatively few cases. Whether there is a systematic or sporadic slant in Gastil's ratings is an open question". The freedom index of Freedom in the World has a very strong and positive correlation with three other democracy-indices studied in Mainwaring.

Ideological bias or neutrality

In his 1986 study, Bollen discussed reviews of measurements of human rights, including the index reported in Freedom in the World. Criticisms of Freedom in the World during the 1980s were discussed by Gastil, who stated that "generally such criticism is based on opinions about Freedom House rather than detailed examination of survey ratings", a conclusion disputed by Giannone. The definition of Freedom in Gastil and Freedom House emphasized liberties rather than the exercise of freedom, according to Adam Przeworski, who gave the following example: In the United States, citizens are free to form political parties and to vote, yet even in presidential elections only half of U.S. "citizens" vote; in the U.S., "the same two parties speak in a commercially sponsored unison", wrote.
More recent charges of ideological bias prompted Freedom House to issue this 2010 statement:
Freedom House does not maintain a culture-bound view of freedom. The methodology of the survey is grounded in basic standards of political rights and civil liberties, derived in large measure from relevant portions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These standards apply to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.

Mainwaring et alia wrote that Freedom House's index had "two systematic biases: scores for leftist were tainted by political considerations, and changes in scores are sometimes driven by changes in their criteria rather than changes in real conditions." Nonetheless, when evaluated in Latin American countries yearly, Freedom House's index was very strongly and positively correlated with the index of Adam Przeworski and with the index of the authors themselves: They evaluated Pearson's coefficient of linear correlation between their index and Freedom House's index, which was 0.82; among these indices and the two others studied, the correlations were all between 0.80 and 0.86 .
As previously quoted, Bollen criticized previous studies of Freedom in the World as anecdotal and inconclusive; they raised issues needing further study by scientific methods rather than anecdotes. Bollen studied the question of ideological bias using multivariate statistics. Using their factor-analytic model for human-rights measurements, Bollen and Paxton estimate that Gastil's method produces a bias of -0.38 standard deviations against Marxist–Leninist countries and a larger bias, +0.5 s.d., favoring Christian countries; similar results held for the methodology of Sussman. In contrast, another method by a critic of Freedom in the World produced a bias for Leftist countries during the 1980s of at least +0.8 s.d., a bias that is "consistent with the general finding that political scientists are more favorable to leftist politics than is the general population".

Use and conceptual analysis

Criticisms of the reception and uses of the Freedom in the World report have been noted by Diego Giannone:
In "Political and ideological aspects in the measurement of democracy: the Freedom House case" which reviewed changes to the methodology since 1990, Diego Giannone concluded that "because of the changes in methodology over time and the strict interconnection between methodological and political aspects, the FH data do not offer an unbroken and politically neutral time series, such that they should not be used for cross-time analyses even for the development of first hypotheses. The internal consistency of the data series is open to question."
On this topic, the Freedom House website replies that they have "made a number of modest methodological changes to adapt to evolving ideas about political rights and civil liberties. At the same time, the time series data are not revised retroactively, and any changes to the methodology are introduced incrementally in order to ensure the comparability of the ratings from year to year."