ABSTRACT
Are new democracies stable and viable? Freedom House finds that there have recently been signs that an erosion of new democracies is getting underway. By historical standards, the overall state of freedom in the world has clearly improved over the last two decades. However, we can see a continued erosion of freedom in terms of political rights and civil liberties worldwide, with setbacks in Latin America, Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. In particular, 2009 marks a fourth continuous year of deterioration in the area of freedom; declines of political rights and civil liberties were registered in 40 countries, representing 20 percent of the world’s polities (Freedom House 2010). This is close to what Larry Diamond (2008) has labeled “democratic recession.”
