Freedom in the World

Freedom in the World is a yearly survey and report by the U.S.-basednon-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.

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 (most free) to 7 (least free). 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.

The rankings below are from the Freedom in the World 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 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" (1.0-2.5), "Partly Free" (3.0-5.0), or "Not Free" (5.5-7.0).

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

An electoral democracy also must have a score of 7 or more out of 12 in political rights subcategory A (Electoral Progress) and an overall aggregate score of 20 in their political rights 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.

Note: The Middle East countries of Turkey, Cyprus, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia can be found in the "Europe" and "Eurasia" sections of Freedom House's Freedom in the World report.

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