Inspired by a regular commenter I took a look again at Freedom House’s evaluations of various countries. Some might find it dry reading but I found it interesting. It’s unclear to me how one would go about comparing political and civil liberties in a small, compact highly cohesive country like, say, Switzerland with a large, diverse, and wildly noncohesive country like the United States.
In all honesty rather than being dismayed at Freedom House’s low ranking of the United States (spoiler alert: we aren’t rated 100% free) I was surprised that we were rated as high as we were. I can only speculate that those doing the research don’t reside in Illinois.
I suspect that if you are a rater and you ever lived in Russia Illinois looks wildly free. Anyway, I have looked at the methods before but I cant tell who they choose as analysts (probably just missed it) which may effect ratings just as much as what you decide to measure. I think the Heritage index is much more biased by what it decides to measure.
Steve
Forgot. What is with the right wing worship of Orban? Granted, he is not nearly as corrupt and authoritarian as Putin, whim the also have loved, but still pretty bad. I get that he gives the right wing religious people goose bumps since he is willing to codify their religious beliefs into law, but even the non-religious right seem to love the guy. Just a tribal thing? Part of the tribe loves him so everyone must?
Steve
I think these ratings have to be taken with a grain of salt, maybe +/- 10 points. The gist is probably right, but for example I’m not sure how independent media truly is in countries with government media. There are trade-offs that work differently in different democratic systems. American democracy is messy and is pretty confounding to elites, foreign and abroad.