Freedom in the World

[[Image:2011 Freedom House world map.svg|thumb|330px|Country ratings from Freedom House's Freedom in the World 2011 survey, concerning the state of world freedom in 2010.

The Freedom House rankings are often treated as authoritative, although not without criticism (see below). They are widely used in academic studies, by the United Nations, the World Bank, USAID, and others. They often appear in the media as objective indices, and "are now used indiscriminately as a yardstick for the measurement of democracy." and Freedom in the World 2011

An asterisk (*) indicates countries which are "electoral democracies". To qualify as an "electoral democracy", a state must have satisfied the following criteria:

#A competitive, multiparty political system; #Universal adult suffrage for all citizens (with exceptions for restrictions that states may legitimately place on citizens as sanctions for criminal offenses); #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 #Significant public access of major political parties to the electorate through the media and through generally open political campaigning.

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.

Notes:

The years shown in the map and table above are the year the survey was released, the data shown covers the prior calendar year.

The map and table above do not include data for related/disputed territories.

Criticism

There is some debate over the neutrality of Freedom House and the methodology used for the FITW report. One study reviewing changes to the methodology since 1990 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." "have pointed out that the index by FH has been used as a tool for measuring democracy, good governance, and human rights, thus producing a conceptual stretching which is a major cause of 'losses in connotative precision': cited in Giannone 2010) cited in Giannone 2010) stated that the scales are influenced by the conservative ideology of FH. Bollen underlined their Cold War and pro-market biases, while Bollen and Paxton emphasized that the index of FH systematically favors Christian and Western countries, and tends to adversely codify Muslim and Marxist-Leninist countries. Mainwaring et al. pointed out that FH measurements 'contain two systematic biases: scores for leftist governments were tainted by political considerations, and changes in scores are sometimes driven by changes in their criteria rather than changes in real conditions'. Gastil responds that 'generally such criticism is based on opinions about Freedom House rather than detailed examination of survey ratings'. However, Giannone (2010) finds "a perfect coincidence between FH changes and the strategies of US foreign policy implemented in 1990s, and above all after 11 September 2001 by the Bush administration, to spread freedom and export democracy."

"Freedom is defined almost always in a negative way, with particular reference to the role of the state, accused of undue intervention, indoctrination, and even equated with criminal organizations as obstacle to private economic activity".

"In the checklists there is a tendency to consider and evaluate only the existence of formal rights and not substantive rights."

Freedom House's reply to these criticisms may be found at their website:

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.

See also

List of indices of freedom

References

External links

Freedom in the World - online at Freedom House

Category:Human rights Category:Lists of countries by international rankings