Liberal Democracies Around The World
Several organisations and political scientists maintain lists of free and unfree states, both in the present and going back a couple centuries. Of these, the best known may be the Polity Data Set and that produced by Freedom House.
There is agreement amongst several intellectuals and organizations such as Freedom House that the states of the European Union, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, India, Canada, Israel, Mexico, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand are liberal democracies, with Canada having the largest land area and India currently having the largest population among the democracies in the world.
Freedom House considers many of the officially democratic governments in Africa and the former Soviet Union to be undemocratic in practice, usually because the sitting government has a strong influence over election outcomes. Many of these countries are in a state of considerable flux.
Officially non-democratic forms of government, such as single-party states and dictatorships are more common in East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Read more about this topic: Liberal Democracy
Famous quotes containing the words the world, liberal, democracies and/or world:
“The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“God reigns ... when we take a liberal view,when a liberal view is presented to us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological controlindoctrination we might sayexercised through the mass media.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness which joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child”
—Johan Huizinga (18721945)