Freedom in the World
Freedom in the World is a yearly survey and report by the U.S.-based 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.
Critical assessments of the survey have highlighted potential biases stemming from its funding, methodology, ideological leanings and the subjective nature of the scoring. Freedom House has defended its ratings as independent and evidence-based.
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 are from the Freedom in the World 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 surveys, each report covering the previous year. The average of each pair of ratings on political rights and civil liberties determines the 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:
- A competitive, multiparty political system;
- Adult suffrage for all citizens without criminal convictions ;
- 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.
World
* indicates "Civil liberties in country or territory" or "Human rights in country or territory" links.'''PR = political rights, CL = civil liberties'''
2025
Before 2025
Territories and countries with limited recognition
Former entries
Former entries from Freedom in the World. Most are territories added in the 1978 report for 1977 and received their last coverage in the 2000 report of the same year. Other territories with differing dates are noted below. Their placements are based on their final rankings before ceasing coverage.Free
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- French Guiana
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- Guadeloupe
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- Martinique
- Mayotte
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- New Caledonia
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- Northern Ireland
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- Réunion
- Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha
- Saint Martin
- Saint Pierre and Miquelon
- Svalbard
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- ''Wallis and Futuna''
Partly Free
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- West Papua
- Yugoslavia
Not Free
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- Eastern Donbas
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- Occupied Territories
- Palestinian Territories
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- Vojvodina
Evaluation
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".
Coder bias
Political scientists Andrew T. Little and Anne Meng argued that the data produced by Freedom House and the Varieties of Democracy project relies heavily on subjective, as opposed to objective, measures and thus are tainted by coder bias.Use and conceptual analysis
Criticisms of the reception and uses of the Freedom in the World report have been noted by Diego Giannone:- "Conceptual stretching", Giovanni Sartori's critical term for a methodological shortcoming common in social studies. Giannone reports as an example that, according to Landman and Hausermann, "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': in short, an instrument used to measure everything, in the end, is not able to discriminate against anything."
- Issues with aggregation. Giannone quotes Scoble and Wiseberg's conclusion that "the sum of a civil liberty score of 4 and a political liberty score of 2 is the same as the sum of a civil liberty score of 2 and a political liberty score of 4 even though the substantive interpretation of these different combinations is different."
- "Lack of specificity and rigorousness in construction" and "inadequate level of transparency and replicability of the scales", the first referencing to Scoble et alie and the latter to Hadenius and Teorell. In support of the latter, he also quotes the conclusion of Munck and Verkuilen that "the aggregate data offered by Freedom House has to be accepted largely on faith", due to the factors that "no set of coding rules is provided, and the sources of information are not identified with enough precision, and because disaggregated data have not been made available to independent scholars".