The Politics of Rating Freedom: Ideological Affinity, Private Authority, and the Freedom in the World Ratings

Abstract

TheFreedom in the World(FITW) ratings of countries’ freedom, created by Freedom House in 1972, are widely used by many U.S. audiences, including journalists, policymakers, and scholars. Why and how did these ratings acquire private authority in the United States? Furthermore, why and to what extent have they retained private authority over time and across different audiences? Contrary to previous research on private authority, which emphasizes the role of raters’ expertise and independence, I advance an argument that emphasizes the role of ideological affinity between raters and users. Specifically, I argue that ratings are more likely to have authority among actors that share raters’ ideas about concept definition and coding. I also argue that ratings are more likely to have authority among weak actors that depend on powerful other users of the ratings. Diverse evidence and methods—including data on the ratings’ usage, an internal archive of Freedom House records, interviews with key informants, and a statistical analysis of bias—support the argument.

Non‐Governmental Monitoring of Local Governments Increases Compliance with Central Mandates: A National‐Scale Field Experiment in China

“…Indeed, NGOs and other types of nonstate actors are increasingly disseminating ratings publicly in their attempt to gain influence in governance. Our study provides additional support for the argument put forward by Bush () that ratings gain influence mainly by appealing to and being consistent with the interests of powerful audiences. The results of our study point to new ways that NGOs can get involved in solving governance challenges even in authoritarian settings.…”

Bad science: International organizations and the indirect power of global benchmarking

“…At the same time as benchmarking has become a core tool of domestic regulation, transnational actors have increasingly produced ratings and rankings to assess relative national performance at the global level. Benchmarks have become integral to the comparative evaluation of countries’ institutional design, policy agendas and behaviour across issue areas as diverse as global development goals ( Clegg, 2015 ), climate change action ( Kuzemko, 2015 ), corruption ( Baumann, 2017 ), human security ( Homolar, 2015 ), international human rights norms ( Harrison and Sekalala, 2015 ), national economic policies and institutions ( Sending and Lie, 2015 ), political freedom ( Bush, forthcoming ), and poverty reduction ( Freistein, 2016 ). Global benchmarks based on country rankings are deceptively easy to communicate and consume around the world.…”

National Perspectives and Quantitative Datasets: A Silver Lining?

“…Since datasets reflect subjective judgments, actors in world politics are more likely to adopt the datasets that reflect their shared values. For example, Bush (2017) finds that the Freedom in the World (FITW) dataset on countries' levels of democracy, which is produced by Freedom House, is used more widely by certain audiences-including American policymakers and democracy-promotion practitioners-than other datasets on democracy. As elaborated below, Bush argues that this pattern obtains because the FITW dataset is more consistent with elite American audiences' ideas about what democracy is and which countries are democratic than other datasets.…”

“…However, the affinity between how FITW approaches democracy and how the U.S. government approaches democracy distinguishes the Freedom House ratings from other prominent democracy indicators. See Bush (2017).…”