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 liberal, democracies and/or world:
“We imagined that the sun shining on their bare heads had stamped a liberal and public character on their most private thoughts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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“This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)