The Freedom House Survey for 2019: The Leaderless Struggle for Democracy

Why are Politically Active People Avoided in Countries with Collectivistic Culture? A Cross-Cultural Experiment

“…To examine the possibility that this cross-level interaction is an artifact attributable to the correlation between cultures and political systems, we added different indices of democracy one by one and calculated their interaction with the political demonstration treatment. The index of democracy included the Freedom House index (Repucci, 2020), the three indices from the V-Dem Project (the liberal democracy index, electoral democracy index, and participatory democracy index) (Coppedge et al, 2020), and the Economic Intelligence Unit’s democracy scores (The Economist, 2019) (see OA3 in the Online Supplemental Appendix for the results). The interaction effect between individualism and political demonstration treatment consistently showed a significant effect even after controlling for the democracy indices, suggesting that the cultural contingency of the political demonstration treatment on social distance is not an artifact of correlation between cultures and political systems.…”

State Capacity in Responding to COVID-19

“…To measure democracy, we use the Freedom in the World 2020 data (Repucci (2020)) on Free, Partly Free, or Not Free status of countries determined from the combined overall scores for political rights (free and fair elections, political pluralism and participation, a functioning government, open and transparent government, strong and effective safeguards against official corruption) and civil liberties (free media, freedom of expression and belief, freedom of assembly, the rule of law, personal freedoms and rights). According to the Freedom in the World methodology, liberal democracies are Free countries while some Partly Free countries meet minimum standards and qualify as electoral democracies (Repucci (2020)). In the current study, the three categories of Free, Partly Free and Non-Free countries presented in Table 1 are treated as being democratic, partially democratic, and undemocratic.…”

“…Such outcomes will surely provide input to the long-standing debate over the performance of democracy and authoritarianism (Dorsch et al (2020); Cronert (2020)). The current study includes the level of democracy as a categorical variable indicating Free, Partly Free, or Not Free status of countries based on the Freedom in the World 2020 data (Repucci (2020)).…”

The early COVID-19 pandemic and democratic attitudes

“…The COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the midst of a democratic recession. Globally, the public’s commitment to the most fundamental tenet of democracy–regular elections–has been wavering [ 1 , 2 ]. Early research suggests that, much like the introduction of threats to national security from abroad, the COVID-19 pandemic may initially increase support for the incumbent administration [ 3 , 4 ].…”