In 1941, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, President Franklin Roosevelt‘s Republican challenger the previous year, founded Freedom House “to rally policymakers and a broadly isolationist American public around the fight against Nazi Germany and to raise awareness of the fascist threat to American security and values.” With the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, Freedom House shifted its mission to defend democracy more explicitly. In recent decades, the group has sought to quantify this. Both in-house and with the contribution of outside scholars, Freedom House seeks to quantify the quality of democracy and freedom by measuring the political freedoms of every country in the world, including those that lack international recognition and self-governing territories.
For years, Freedom House ranked not only
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