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.

[4] The Freedom House rankings are widely reported in the media and used as sources by political researchers.

[18] Bollen wrote that "Considered together these criticisms suggest that some nations may have been incorrectly rated on Gastil's measures.

These standards apply to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.

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 (s.d.)

[21] 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" (Bollen and Paxton, p. 585).

[21] Political scientists Andrew T. Little and Anne Meng argued that the data produced by Freedom House and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project relies heavily on subjective, as opposed to objective, measures and thus are tainted by coder bias.

[22] Criticisms of the reception and uses of the Freedom in the World report have been noted by Diego Giannone:[23][unreliable source?]

In "Political and ideological aspects in the measurement of democracy: the Freedom House case" (2010) 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.

"[29] 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.