Freedom in the World 2024: Armed conflict, election manipulation drive global freedom decline

For the latest in our series on organizations that inspire us to take action to build a stronger democracy, Democracy Group community manager Jessie Nguyen caught up with Freedom House Senior Research Analyst and co-author of the "Freedom in the World 2024: The Mounting Damage of Flawed Elections and Armed Conflict" report Cathryn Grothe. We talked about the reasoning behind the global freedom decline in recent years and key takeaways from the study.‍

‍Tell me about yourself and Freedom in the World.‍

‍Cathryn: I am a senior research analyst at Freedom House. I work on our Freedom in the World project, our annual assessment of political rights and civil liberties around the world. We cover 210 countries and territories, assessing them on different indicators related to government, political rights, the freedom of the media association and so on.

Freedom in the World has been around for over 50 years. Every year, it comes out with a full assessment of the state of freedom globally. We use numerical scores based on 25 indicators that are largely from the United Nations Human Rights Declaration and work with experts to assess every single country.

‍What are the key findings in this year’s report?

Cathryn: Unfortunately, we found that freedom declined again last year, which is the 18th year of consecutive decline in freedom around the world. This means more countries are seeing net declines in their overall scores and net improvements. Last year, we looked at two themes driving this decline — manipulation in elections and armed conflict.

It was concerning to find that so many elections last year had these trends of attacking opposition members, creating laws that make an unlevel playing field that benefits incumbents and efforts to violently overturn election results. Given what’s happening this year, we’re continuing to follow up and track some of those threats to the integrity of elections.

The other thing we found that was driving the decline was armed conflict and repression of people who live in disputed territory, which are sometimes outside the balance of international laws. We looked at how their rights and freedoms are systematically undermined, often by a country or a government that is seeking to exercise territorial control.

‍What are some of the more hopeful trends that the report identified?

Cathryn: One thing that we try to do and we see in every conversation is identify the bright spots around the world. In some places, it could be countries that are legalizing same-sex marriage or abortion. We’re seeing an increase in social freedoms and places in the world that you might not expect.

Another one this year is places that had for the first time, or relatively recently, very free and fair elections or saw the peaceful transfer of power. One that I like to highlight is Botswana, which just had elections and saw a huge win for the opposition, essentially the peaceful change of power from the incumbent who I believe held power for the last 20 years.

Good things are going on around the world. I think that’s just as important to highlight as some of these concerning trends.

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