Freedom in the World
annual survey by Freedom House
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.
Critical assessments of the survey have highlighted potential biases stemming from its funding, methodology, ideological leanings and the subjective nature of the scoring. Freedom House has defended its ratings as independent and evidence-based.
Origin and use
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.
Country and territory assessments
Methodology
Together with descriptive texts, Freedom in the World reports assign each country and territory "scores", "ratings", and a "status", as well as determining whether or not it is an "electoral democracy".
The public source identifies “Freedom in the World” as annual survey by Freedom House. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Freedom, World and annual.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1417780. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Freedom in the World” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.