Freedom House Ratings' Distortion by US Attitude

Mezhdunarodnye Protsessy. 2026. Vol. 23. No. 3. P. 41–63.

Royce D. P.

Although studies have already found Freedom House’s* Freedom in the World rankings to be geopolitically biased, the index remains in use by academia (including Russian academia) with surprising frequency. This article provides detailed and quantitative evidence that Freedom House* is essentially part of the US Government and US political establishment, and is thus in principle liable to issue moral judgements that are distorted by the US’s attitude towards the states under judgement. The article then develops a more accurate formula for calculating a state’s democraticness according to the Polity index, and also develops an improved method, based on arms transfers and UNGA voting, of approximating states’ alignment with the US (and thus presumed US attitude towards states). It then uses these metrics to measure
the effect of US attitude on Freedom House’s* evaluations of states’ freedom/democracy. This bias is found to be about half as powerful as the effect of actual regime type, approaching equal size in more recent years. Its magnitude is sufficient to, in some cases, completely transform a state’s regime type, from very democratic to very authoritarian or (less commonly) vice versa. These findings cast grave doubt upon the validity of Freedom House* metrics and confirm the US’s status as a universalistic state whose application of its own Cosmopolitan-Liberal ideology is deeply flawed, and they problematize political science in universalistic states as not only (or at all) a source of knowledge, but also (or instead) an important source of legitimation and motivation for such states’ international behavior.

 

* Designated an undesirable organization in Russia by Ministry of Justice Order No. 619-R of 21 May 2024 and by decision of the Office of the General Prosecutor on 6 May 2024.

Keywords: демократия, США, политический режим, USA, democracy, искажение, отношение, bias, arms, alignment, regime type, UNGA, Генеральная Ассамблея ООН, Freedom House, Polity, Freedom House, Polity, поставки оружия