Eurasia has declined to the point where its political rights scores are lower than those of any other region. Russia’s authoritarian regime committed fresh outrages in 2013…It also employed bullying tactics to discourage neighboring countries from initialing agreements with the European Union.
I looked at this report on freedom in the world in light of my essay that used the Fraser Index of economic freedom as an indicator of the quality of governance. Economic freedom and political freedom do not always coincide. Hong Kong and Singapore rank near the top in terms of economic freedom, but they are only partly free in the Freedom House measure.
I used a two-factor model to explain the Fraser Index: country size (larger countries tend to have poorer scores) and national-average IQ (higher IQ tends to be correlated with higher scores).
Looking at the Freedom House index, a third factor stands out: Communist legacy. If you want a country not to be free, regardless of size of national-average IQ, give it a Communist government or a history of Communism.
There does exist a negative correlation between political freedom and size, in that the percentage of countries ranked free is higher than the percentage of the world’s population accounted for by countries that are ranked free. However, China may account for most of that negative correlation.
My guess is that if you want to find a country without political freedom, first look for a country with a Communist legacy. After you’ve gone through those, move on to countries with low national-average IQ. Once you have done that, I am not sure that population size will matter.
The only “political non-freedom” that really matters on a day-to-day basis here in China, though is the censorship of websites. Unfortunately, with the NSA and IRS, can we really say the US is better? It seems our only basis for doing so is self-denial about the state of “our” country.
These are distorted by differences in how goals are accomplished. Governments that tax and spend are considered less free than ones that mandate and subsidize, even though the result is the same, so many of these measures are illusory.
Okay but is that because communism in the past is indicative of a culture that leads to limited freedoms? Or does it mean communism changed the culture and socialized the treatment of people as chattel?