Freedom House ratings measure democracy but never governmental capacity directly

Evidence

Broadly speaking, the Freedom House ratings for political rights address breadth, equality, and binding consultation, whereas civil liberties mainly concern protection. Neither deals with governmental capacity directly, although capacity figures indirectly in answers to such questions as PR7 (“Are the people free from domination by the military, foreign powers, totalitarian parties, religious hierarchies, economic oligarchies, or any other powerful group?”) and CL10 (“Are property rights secure? Do citizens have the right to establish private businesses? Is private business activity unduly influenced by government officials, the security forces, or organized crime?”). Remembering that higher scores are less democratic, then, think of the multiple Political Rights Civil Liberties as a rough measure of democracy, mildly tinged by governmental capacity. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 453

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to testing the reader’s central question: this tells us Tilly’s capacity/democracy matrix cannot be cleanly derived from Freedom House data because capacity is only faintly and indirectly present. — connects to: Freedom House’s combined ratings proxy democracy with weak capacity content — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 454
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: if Freedom House ratings are oblivious to state capacity, what empirical index would let someone partition regimes on the capacity axis to test the asymmetry hypothesis?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 453

Broader Connections

• Freedom House’s combined ratings proxy democracy with weak capacity content #corroborates (0.91) — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 454