Freedom House Electoral Democracies List

Downloads the 2025 update of the Freedom House Electoral Democracies list and processes it using country_year_coder. The original data is available at https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world, spread over a number of different urls. This function uses the full data (see download_fh_full) to recalculate the list.

Usage

download_fh_electoral(verbose = TRUE, return_raw = FALSE, ...)

Source

F. House. Freedom in the World 2025: The Uphill Battle to Safeguard Rights. Tech. rep. Freedom House, Feb. 2025.. Original data and methodology is available at https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world

Arguments

verbose: Whether to print a running commentary of what the function is doing while processing the data.
return_raw: Whether to return the raw data, with minimal processing. Default is FALSE.
...: Other parameters passed to country_year_coder.

Value

A time-series tidy version of the FH electoral democracies dataset, with the following variables:

country: The original country name.
year: The calendar year. This is approximate. The surveys cover specific periods in the original data that do not always overlap with a single year. In particular, the year 1981 is "skipped" – a single survey covers Jan. 1981 - Aug. 1982 and its value is assigned to 1982 here. Freedom House did not appear to issue a list of electoral democracies in its 2021 Freedom in the World report, so the year 2020 is not available; but there is a list of electoral democracies for the 2022 report, so the year 2021 is available. 2020 is thus "skipped". (It is in principle possible to reconstruct the list of electoral democracies using the full FH data, but the methodology is a little opaque).
electoral: Electoral democracy indicator. TRUE = yes, FALSE = no.
electoral_calc: Electoral democracy indicator, calculated from the full scores (see download_fh_full) using the definition of electoral democracy that Freedom House uses from 2017 onwards. TRUE = yes, FALSE = no. Because Freedom House changed the criteria for designating an electoral democracy in the 2018 edition of their Freedom in the World report, this variable is included to allow users to understand which countries would not have been considered electoral democracies after 2017 that would have been considered electoral democracies before 2017. As the Freedom House methodology page notes, "beginning with the 2018 edition, countries require an overall Civil Liberties score of 30 or better—in addition to a score of 7 or better in subcategory A (Electoral Process), and an overall Political Rights score of 20 or better—to qualify as an electoral democracy." This change resulted in 32 country-years that would have been classified as electoral democracies before 2017 not being considered electoral democracies using the post-2017 criteria:

fh_electoral <- download_fh_electoral(verbose = FALSE)
fh_electoral |>
  dplyr::filter(electoral != electoral_calc) |>
  dplyr::select(extended_country_name, year, electoral, electoral_calc) |>
  print(n = 32)
#> # A tibble: 32 x 4
#>    extended_country_name    year electoral electoral_calc
#>    <chr>                   <dbl> <lgl>     <lgl>
#>  1 Bangladesh               2013 TRUE      FALSE
#>  2 Bangladesh               2014 TRUE      FALSE
#>  3 Bangladesh               2015 TRUE      FALSE
#>  4 Bangladesh               2016 TRUE      FALSE
#>  5 Bhutan                   2012 TRUE      FALSE
#>  6 Bhutan                   2013 TRUE      FALSE
#>  7 Bhutan                   2014 TRUE      FALSE
#>  8 Bhutan                   2015 TRUE      FALSE
#>  9 Bhutan                   2016 TRUE      FALSE
#> 10 Honduras                 2014 TRUE      FALSE
#> 11 Kenya                    2014 TRUE      FALSE
#> 12 Kenya                    2015 TRUE      FALSE
#> 13 Kenya                    2016 TRUE      FALSE
#> 14 Kosovo                   2014 TRUE      FALSE
#> 15 Kosovo                   2015 TRUE      FALSE
#> 16 Kosovo                   2016 TRUE      FALSE
#> 17 Libya                    2012 TRUE      FALSE
#> 18 Libya                    2013 TRUE      FALSE
#> 19 Maldives                 2014 TRUE      FALSE
#> 20 Nepal                    2013 TRUE      FALSE
#> 21 Nepal                    2014 TRUE      FALSE
#> 22 Nepal                    2015 TRUE      FALSE
#> 23 Nepal                    2016 TRUE      FALSE
#> 24 Niger                    2015 TRUE      FALSE
#> 25 Nigeria                  2015 TRUE      FALSE
#> 26 Nigeria                  2016 TRUE      FALSE
#> 27 Pakistan                 2013 TRUE      FALSE
#> 28 Pakistan                 2014 TRUE      FALSE
#> 29 Pakistan                 2015 TRUE      FALSE
#> 30 Pakistan                 2016 TRUE      FALSE
#> 31 Turkey (Ottoman Empire)  2014 TRUE      FALSE
#> 32 Turkey (Ottoman Empire)  2015 TRUE      FALSE

Note that electoral_calc is not available for years before 2012, because Freedom House does not make available full scores for years before 2012, despite the fact that the list of electoral democracies goes back to 1989.

Standard descriptive variables (generated by this package)

extended_country_name: The name of the country in the Gleditsch-Ward system of states, or the official name of the entity (for non-sovereign entities and states not in the Gleditsch and Ward system of states) or else a common name for disputed cases that do not have an official name (e.g., Western Sahara, Hyderabad). The Gleditsch and Ward scheme sometimes indicates the common name of the country and (in parentheses) the name of an earlier incarnation of the state: thus, they have Germany (Prussia), Russia (Soviet Union), Madagascar (Malagasy), etc. For details, see Gleditsch, Kristian S. & Michael D. Ward. 1999. "Interstate System Membership: A Revised List of the Independent States since 1816." International Interactions 25: 393-413. The list can be found at http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ksg/statelist.html.
GWn: Gleditsch and Ward's numeric country code, from the Gleditsch and Ward list of independent states.
cown: The Correlates of War numeric country code, 2016 version. This differs from Gleditsch and Ward's numeric country code in a few cases. See http://www.correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/state-system-membership for the full list.
in_GW_system: Whether the state is "in system" (that is, is independent and sovereign), according to Gleditsch and Ward, for this particular date. Matches at the end of the year; so, for example South Vietnam 1975 is FALSE because, according to Gleditsch and Ward, the country ended on April 1975 (being absorbed by North Vietnam). It is also TRUE for dates beyond 2012 for countries that did not end by then, depsite the fact that the Gleditsch and Ward list has not been updated since.

Note

The datasets downloaded by the download_* family of functions are not directly available in this package. You will always need to directly download them in order to use them.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
fh <- download_fh_electoral()
fh
} # }