Extra Credit: More Freedom!

Is there a relationship between wealth and freedom? What about government stability? The Bubble Chart of Freedom is here to find out.

Again, I'm using Freedom House's Freedom in the World index. Today's chart focuses on the top 50 largest countries by population, and the freedom ratings are from Freedom House's scores for 2012.

There's a significant amount of research suggesting a strong correlation between national wealth and democracy. Perhaps I'll post a bibliography on the topic sometime soon. In the meantime, the data here seem to support that correlation. The Free countries in the green shades are mostly floating at the top of the chart, where the values for GDP per capita are highest. Not all Free countries are among the wealthiest — India and Indonesia are pretty low on the GDP scale — but almost all the wealthiest countries are Free.

The x axis shows how long each country's constitution (or in the absence of a constitution, the legal document establishing the current form of government) has been in place. The question I wanted to answer here is whether countries with more stable governments are more likely to be Free, with constitution age acting as a proxy for regime stability. It's a tricky measure, since it really doesn't say anything about the content of the constitution or how the government applies it, but hopefully it does help separate countries in transition from more established governments.

Because so many countries have been through significant transitions and adopted new constitutions within the last 50 years, the x axis scale is logged to alleviate some of the crowding between the 10 and 50 year marks.

The relationship between constitution age and freedom is not as clear as the one between wealth and freedom. It is interesting to note that none of the countries that adopted new constitutions in the last 15 years is Free.

Again, only the 50 most populous countries are shown here. The full data set might show a different picture — perhaps on a future post.

Here's the data in table form. Countries with Freedom House scores of 1 to 2.5 are Free, 3 to 5 are Partly Free, and 5.5 to 7 are Not Free.



Data Sources: Freedom House Freedom in the World reports.
Population, GDP per capita and constitution data from the CIA World Factbook 2013.

Chart Tool: Google