Editing Freedom House (section)

===''Freedom in the World''===
{{Main|Freedom in the World}}

[[File:2021 Freedom House world map.png|thumb|430px|Classification of countries according to the Freedom House's ''Freedom in the World 2021'' survey, concerning the state of world freedom in 2020.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map?type=fiw&year=2020|title=Freedom in the World Countries {{!}} Freedom House|website=freedomhouse.org|language=en|access-date=2020-06-26}}</ref>
{{center|{{legend inline|#00AB81|Free}} {{legend inline|#E7BA09|Partially Free}} {{legend inline|#6A71A8|Not Free}}}}]]

Since 1973, Freedom House publishes an annual report, ''Freedom in the World'', which it seeks to assess<ref name="usedby">{{Cite web|last1=Casper|first1=Gretchen|last2=Tufis|first2=Claudiu|url=http://polisci.la.psu.edu/faculty/Casper/caspertufisPAweb.pdf|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030521095112/http://polisci.la.psu.edu/faculty/Casper/caspertufisPAweb.pdf|url-status=dead|title=Correlation versus Interchangeability: The Limited Robustness of Empirical Findings on Democracy using Highly Correlated Datasetsi|archive-date=2003-05-21|date=2003-05-21|access-date=2019-05-29}}</ref> the current state of [[civil liberties]] and [[Freedom (political)|political rights]] in 195 countries and 15 territories.

Freedom House's methods (around 1990) and other democracy-researchers were mentioned as examples of an expert-based evaluation by [[sociologist]] [[Kenneth A. Bollen]], who is also an [[applied statistics|applied]] [[statistician]]. Bollen writes that expert-based evaluations are prone to [[statistical bias]] of an unknown direction, that is, not known either to agree with U.S. policy or to disagree with U.S. policy: "Regardless of the direction of distortions, it is highly likely that every set of indicators formed by a single author or organization contains systematic measurement error.  The origin of this measure lies in the common methodology of forming measures.  Selectivity of information and various traits of the judges fuse into a distinct form of bias that is likely to characterize all indicators from a common publication."<ref>Bollen, K.A. (1992) Political Rights and Political Liberties in Nations: An Evaluation of Human Rights Measures, 1950 to 1984. In: Jabine, T.B. and Pierre Claude, R. "Human Rights and Statistics". University of Pennsylvania Press.  {{ISBN|0-8122-3108-2}}</ref>