The 2018 edition of Freedom House’s annual report on political rights and civil liberties, Freedom in the World, is out, and it’s illustrated by maps that categorize countries into “free,” “partly free” or “not free” and assign them a score out of 100. (I can’t say 1 to 100, because Syria is -1. According to them, it’s been a bad year for global freedom.) The main map, above, shows the three categorizations. It’s a bit reductionist: “partly free” includes Morocco (score: 39) and Bolivia (score: 67), which obscures the fact that Morocco’s score is closer to nearby Algeria’s (35, “not free”) and Bolivia’s is closer to Peru’s (73, “free”) than they are to each other. But scores and categories don’t always map cleanly to one another. A second choropleth map of the scores themselves is more granular, and more revealing:
