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Abstract
While several studies have dealt with methodological aspects of measuring democracy, little attention has been devoted to the political and ideological issues that affect the construction and structure of these measuring instruments. The aim of this study is twofold: in analysing the cultural and economic dimensions of the Freedom House (FH) organization, it seeks to delineate the political background of FH, thus underlining its neoconservative bias. Secondly, by focusing on the changes over time in the checklists used by FH to measure democracy, this study aims to analyse to what extent these changes are ideologically driven, in particular, to what are they linked to the neoliberal paradigm. Indeed, the hypothesis is that the construction of FH's scales has been affected by the neoliberal climate in which they were conceived. In the first part, the work reconstructs the academic debate about FH's scales and the historical and political context which brought to the affirmation of neoliberal democracy. It also provides a discussion regarding the importance of measurement as a political tool. In the second part, the study provides an analysis of FH through the reconstruction of its political-ideological profile, beginning with the formation of FH to its current internal culture. The third part provides an analysis of the checklists used by FH for measuring democracy. Our findings show that because of the changes in methodology and the strict interconnection between methodological and political aspects, FH data do not offer an unbroken and politically neutral time series, such that their use for cross-time analyses both for research and policy is questionable.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of Democratization for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Notes
Adcock and Collier, ‘Measurement Validity’; Bollen, ‘Liberal Democracy’; Brusis, ‘Assessing the State of Democracy’; Coppedge, ‘Defining and Measuring Democracy’; Hadenius and Teorell, ‘Assessing Alternative Indices of Democracy’; Munck and Verkuilen, ‘Conceptualising and Measuring Democracy’; and Paxton, ‘Women's Suffrage in the Measurement of Democracy’.
Landman and Häusermann, ‘Map-making’.
Sartori, ‘Concept Misformation’, 1035.
Diamond, Developing Democracy, 12.
Landman and Häusermann, ‘Map-making’, 10.
Scoble and Wiseberg, ‘Problems of Comparative Research’.
Hadenius and Teorell, ‘Assessing Alternative Indices of Democracy’, 17.
Munck and Verkuilen, ‘Conceptualising and Measuring Democracy’, 21.
Scoble and Wiseberg, ‘Problems of Comparative Research’.
Bollen, ‘Political Rights and Political Liberties’.
Bollen and Paxton, ‘Subjective Measures’.
Mainwaring, Brinks, and Pérez-Liñán, ‘Classifying Political Regimes’, 53–4.
Gastil, ‘Comparative Survey’, 26.
Harvey, Brief History.
Wallerstein, European Universalism.
Gramsci, Le Opere, 285, my italics and translation. The quote is taken from Notebook no. 10, part II, paragraph 12.
Harvey, ‘Neoliberalism as Creative’, 26.
Ibid., 23.
See http://www.trilateral.org for an updated list of members and activities of the Commission.
Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, Crisis of Democracy, 8.
Crozier, ‘Western Europe’, 12.
Ibid., 13.
Huntington, ‘United States’, 113–14.
Beetham, ‘Market Economy’.
Harvey, Brief History; Przeworski, ‘Neoliberal Fallacy’; Turner, ‘Rebirth of Liberalism’.
Harvey, ‘Neoliberalism as Creative’, 24. The citation of the author is from: http://www.montpelerin.org/mpsabout.cfm.
Harvey, Brief History, 37.
Munck, ‘Monitoreando la Democracia’.
Crouch, Post-Democracy.
Bollen, ‘Liberal Democracy’, 1212.
This and the preceding two quotations are all from www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=2.
Chomsky and Herman, Manufacturing Consent, 27.
http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Freedom_House (italics added). Following a 10 year affiliation with Freedom House, The Center for Religious Freedom joined Hudson Institute in January 2007.
The Committee on the Present Danger defines itself as a non-partisan organization with one goal – to stiffen American resolve to confront the challenge presented by terrorism and the ideologies that drive it. It was a Cold War era, anti-Soviet group, resurrected in June 2004 by a group including many neoconservatives and figures who were part of Freedom House (Woolsey, Kampelman, Muravchik, Adelman, Palmer, and Shea), to support an aggressive war on terror. See www.committeeonthepresentdanger.org.
Adelman was one of the main supporters of US intervention in Iraq until 2006, when he started to criticize, together with Richard Perle and Joshua Muravchik, the policies adopted by the Bush administration in this area, to the extent of supporting the Democratic candidate Barack Obama in the presidential election of 2008.
Muravchik is one of the most influential neo-cons. In particular, he is a staunch supporter of the American military intervention in the Middle East; in November 2006, he wrote an editorial on the Los Angeles Times beginning with these words: ‘We must bomb Iran’ (Muravchik, ‘Bomb Iran’).
‘The influence of AEI on the policies of the [American] administration is clear in the President Bush's speech at the annual dinner of AEI, in February 28, 2003. Before presenting his strategy for establishing democracy in Iraq and bring peace to the Middle East, Bush said: “Some of the best minds of our country are working in the AEI on some of the biggest challenges to our nation. You do so a good job that my administration has borrowed twenty of these brains”’. Lobe and Oliveri, Nuovi Rivoluzionari, 149 (my translation).
To be the CIA director does not involve any neoliberal or neoconservative bias. However, Woolsey is one of the signatories of a public letter of 26 January 1998 to the US President Clinton in which, by deploring the failure of American political ‘containment’ in Iraq and the Middle East, they were urging the adoption of a new strategy aimed at removing Saddam Hussein, accused of producing chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. The letter also expressed concern at ‘that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will all be put at hazard’. The new strategy should be focused on ‘a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy’. This objective had to be achieved without too much worry about the United Nations resolutions, because the ‘American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council’. Among the other signatories of the letter: Kenneth Adelman, John Bolton, Francis Fukuyama, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and respectively the former and the new President of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz and Robert B. Zoellick. A copy of the letter is available on the website of the Project for the New American Century, at http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm. Furthermore, Woolsey is a member of CPD and Avot (Americans for Victory Over Terrorism), as well as co-founder of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran and chair of the Center for Religious Freedom.
Among others, the Center for Security Policy, The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
This is, for example, the position of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Statewatch.
At present it is only possible to make some assumption about the causes of this reduction. It might have been caused by an incidental trend, or by the economic crisis. However, the most striking and intriguing hypothesis relates the halving of government funds to the loss of influence of the neo-cons over the American government. The end of the idyll, dating from 2006, in addition to criticisms towards the government by Adelman, Perle, and other neo-cons in the management of the Iraq war, is confirmed by the removal from positions of government of Wolfowitz (2005) and the resignation of Rumsfeld (2006), the two ‘hawks’ of the neo-conservative right wing.
See Guilhot, The Democracy Makers, for a similar analysis of the NED (National Endowment for Democracy) and the World Bank.
See www.mcc.gov. In order to assess recipient countries, Freedom House is one of the authoritative sources of the initiative, together with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organization, and UNESCO, as well as the Heritage Foundation, an American neo-conservative organization.
Finkel et al., ‘Effects of US Foreign Assistance’. The authors of the report show that US$10 million invested by USAID between 1990 and 2003 in promoting and supporting democracy produced an average increase of 0.25 points in FH's measurements for the countries involved.
‘Rice Limits Rhetoric, and Maybe Impact’, The Washington Post, 24 June 2005.
Acuña-Alfaro, ‘Measuring Democracy in Latin-America; Bacher, ‘Oil and Dictatorship’; Barro, Determinants of Economic Growth; Burkhart, and Lewis-Beck, ‘Comparative Democracy’; Fish and Kroenig, ‘Diversity, Conflict and Democracy’; Foweraker and Krznaric, ‘Constitutional Design and Comparative Democratic Performance’; Grassi, ‘La globalizzazione della democrazia’; Hadenius and Teorell, ‘Cultural and Economic Prerequisites of Democracy’; Huntington, The Third Wave; Inglehart, La società postmoderna; Knack, ‘Does Foreign Aid Promote Democracy?’; Merkel and Croissant, ‘Conclusion: Good and Defective Democracies’; Mungiu-Pippidi, ‘Eu Enlargement and Democracy Progress’; Neumayer, ‘The Determinants of Aid Allocation’; Sano and Lindholt, Human Rights Indicators.
United Nations Development Programme, Human Development; United Nations Development Programme, Governance Indicators.
Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi, ‘Governance Matters’; Pritchett and Kaufmann, ‘Civil Liberties’; Gradstein and Milanovic, ‘Does Liberté’.
United Nations Development Programme, Human Development, 1.
Ibid., 37 ff.
Kaufmann, Kraay and Mastruzzi, ‘Governance Matters’.
Gastil, ‘Comparative Survey’, 26.
Dahl identifies two dimensions of polyarchy, participation (or inclusion) and opposition (or contestation), which are based on eight institutional requirements: freedom of expression, right to vote, alternative sources of information, free and fair elections, freedom of association, the right of political leaders to compete for the consensus, electability in public office, institutions that make the government dependent on votes and other forms of political preference (Dahl, Polyarchy).
Merkel, ‘Embedded and Defective’, 34.
Gastil, ‘Comparative Survey’, 30.
Ibid., 31.
For ease of comparison, I made some operations: in putting in a column the checklists for each year, I placed side by side similar items and retained beside each of them the numbering of item's placement in the original list. Sometimes, e.g. when an item was later divided into two questions, it was necessary to place both them beside the original item.
From now on, when not otherwise specified, I shall refer to the 1993 numbering.
For example, for item no. 1 of the political rights checklist, one of the questions is: ‘Can candidates make speeches, hold public meetings, media access and enjoy throughout the campaign free of intimidation?’, while for item no. 1 of the civil liberties checklist one of the questions is: ‘Does the government directly or indirectly censor print, broadcast, and/or internet-based media?’.
Merkel, ‘Embedded and Defective’, 35.