How would we truly rate democracies if we had point-by-point, careful comparisons? Well, it so happens that a Washington-based and government-funded NGO, Freedom House, rates every country on earth for "free" and "democratic" qualities. (Full disclosure; I'm an advisor to the group.) Specifically, it gives every country a rating from 1 to 7 on political rights (call that "democracy") and another on civil liberties ("freedom"). America, as a matter of fact, gets an overall 1-1 rating; so do many of the other democracies, mostly in Europe. But there are finer-grained measures—subscores on questions like "electoral process", "rule of law" and "freedom of expression" that add up to the two topline measures. Not only does America not have perfect subscores; looking at the table for the most recent year with full data (2008), we see that right next to it in the table is Uruguay, which has higher scores in several categories and thus a higher overall score. Ranking all countries on these subscores, America comes in a multi-way tie for 30th place. So according to a respected NGO often considered to be on the centre-right (though the board is politically diverse), America is not the freest country in the world, or most democratic. It isn't second or third either. It's merely in the top tier.
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4 hours ago
I'd be curious to know how the US rates over a historically significant timeline though...
ReplyDeleteFor example, how many of those nations have that "free" makeup because of US influence in the last 224 years? It would seem to me that that would count for something.
And secondly, I'm a) curious to know what the trends are in the US score; and b)curious to know what the role of the contra-Lowry/Ponnuru side has had in any drops in score.
(By that last point, I mean that (to take an example) Chicago politicians would lower the score in things like political integrity, transparency, fraud, etc.. It wouldn't be fair for them to make the argument that their actions are more understandable because the American system doesn't have a strong score on those issues...because of their activity.)
Ha. This just occurred to me...by "Chicago Politicians," I wasn't intending to refer to President Obama. I was thinking more Daley/Blago types. :)
ReplyDeleteBtw...I actually like and respect the work of Freedom House.
ReplyDeleteThey've clearly picked a side in the whole debate about quantitative vs. qualitative evaluation that we used to talk about ad nauseum in our Methodology of Political Science courses though...
I always had a soft spot for qualitative, even if it was seemingly losing the war.
One LAST comment (we all hope :)):
ReplyDeleteOn my point about opponents helping to lower the US "freedom score," if you object to the association to graft, fraud, etc...
...feel free to instead consider economic freedom vs. economic security trade offs. Since liberals favor the latter, it could conceivably lower the US freedom scores.