Freedom in the World

Obviously, that includes the right to choose your leaders, and so democracy is an important component of that.

We also look in our various research reports, including Freedom in the World, which is the leading democracy index globally.

It's been running for 53 years.

So we have significant data to back up our research findings.

I'm curious, what do you do with this concept of illiberal democracy, right? So the idea that you have voters and sometimes by large majorities are supporting illiberal or sort of policies which lead to unfree.

circumstances have you sort of wrestled with that concept we have because i mean we

have in our freedom in the world rankings we rank every country in the world on a scale of a hundred we countries move up and down depending on a year a year depending on what's happening in the various categories that we're assessing and so there have been multiple countries especially over the last decade that are established democracies and our matrix would be fully free fully free partly free unfree and some of the fully free countries have been declining.

We've had 20 years of global democratic decline across all countries in the world, but even within the democracy category, we've obviously had established democracies, India, Hungary, Poland has been moving, and obviously the US, where we've documented a 12-point decline over 20 years in our index.

Yes, it is in decline now, but is it permanent? Is there solutions? Where are we? What's the future for it in your view?

Well, Freedom House, which publishes its annual Freedom in the World survey every year, has noted that the aggregate level of democracy in the world has declined for every one of the last 20 years.

So since about the time of the financial crisis in 2008, when it peaked, the number has gone down.

But qualitatively, a lot of big, important countries have backslid.