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:
“It is not quite the same when we are seventy-two as when we are twenty-seven; still I am glad of what is left, and wish we might both hold out till the victory we have sought is won, but all the same the victory is coming. In the aftertime the world will be the better for it.”
—Lucy Stone (1818–1893)
“... liberal intellectuals ... tend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping that those in positions of authority may prove to be enlightened men, wielding power justly, they are natural, if cautious, allies of the “establishment.””
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Democracies are notorious for a tendency to obey the feelings rather than the mind; thus the nature of democracies often makes it difficult to conclude a peace after a hard-won war. Generous victors are rare.”
—Amos Elon (b. 1926)
“Fate forces its way to the powerful and violent. With subservient obedience it will assume for years dependency on one individual: Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, because it loves the elemental human being who grows to resemble it, the intangible element. Sometimes, and these are the most astonishing moments in world history, the thread of fate falls into the hands of a complete nobody but only for a twitching minute.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)