Freedom House’s index of freedom in the world is flawed — but the story it tells is indispensable.
It’s January, which means we’ve just learned that freedom around the
world is declining. This — for the tenth year in a row — is the
conclusion of an
annual report released
earlier this week by Freedom House, the venerable human rights and
democracy organization. Freedom lost ground in 72 countries in 2015, the
report somberly concludes. This is the largest such number over this
gloomy ten-year period, during which the percentage of the world’s
population that lives in “free” countries declined from 46 to 40
percent.
These annual “Freedom in the World” reports, which describe and
numerically rate the state of freedom in every country on earth,
inevitably generate buzz, and this year will be no exception. And it’s
not just the media. Ministers, diplomats, Washington policymakers, U.N.
bureaucrats, and other international wheelers and dealers will be paying
close attention. There’s little doubt that diplomatic cables reporting
the latest scores are already flying — and in some capitals (I’m
looking at you, Budapest) you can almost hear the gnashing of teeth.
In spite of all this commotion, the ivory tower regards the exercise with a mixture of skepticism and exasperation. Over
the last decade, political scientists have produced a wealth of
literature documenting the annual reports’ biases and methodological
problems. Their conceptual basis is flawed; the data collection is
opaque; the results are overly simplified; Freedom House has a
neo-liberal bias. Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist and independent
consultant, has
convincingly disputed Freedom House’s overall findings — that freedom in the world is steadily declining — for
two years in a row.
And yet, flawed as they may be, Freedom House’s ratings still matter.
They are a crucial tool for pro-democracy activists. They drive
dictators crazy. And, perhaps most important of all, they get worldwide
attention. The reason is simple: Unlike the number crunchers, Freedom
House knows how to tell a story. And in the world of international human
rights advocacy, one good story is worth a thousand finely tuned
disaggregated indicators.
BY JANUARY 29, 2016