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Chapter 13 Political and Economic Institutions 429
World View
World View
Political Freedom
Democracy is unevenly distributed worldwide. The accompanying map classifies countries according to three degrees of political freedom: free, partly free, and not free.
North America
Europe
South America
Africa
Political Freedom
Free Partly free Not free
Asia
Australia
Interpreting the Map
1. Do you see any pattern in the degree of political freedom around the world?
2. Predict how political freedom around the world will change in the next fifty years. Explain your predictions.
Source: Freedom House, Washington, D.C., 1998.
Is democracy spreading? The collapse of Soviet communism and the end of the Cold War have created opportunities for more societies to adopt democratic forms of government. Still, there is little evidence that democratic societies are on the rise (Karatnycky, 1995; Vanhanen, 1997). Nearly 80 per- cent of the world’s people live in countries classified as “partly free” or “not free.” (See World View above.) “Free” political systems are primarily associ- ated with advanced economic development and are found mainly in a few nations: the nations of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, the United States, some Latin American countries, Japan, and a few African nations.
