What we measureWe have tried to capture the degree to which people are free to enjoy the
major civil liberties—freedom of speech, religion, and association and
assembly—in each country in our survey.
In addition, we include indicators of crime and violence, freedom of movement, and legal discrimination against homosexuals. We also include six variables pertaining to
women’s freedom that are found in various categories of the index. (For
an overview of the sources of our data, see the table in Appendix A.)
We would have liked to have included other important variables, such as
drug and alcohol prohibition, but we found no reliable data sources. In
the case of drug use and alcohol consumption restrictions, we discovered
that constructing our own such data set would be an especially ambitious and rather complex task better left for the future. The following is a
brief description and justification of the data we use. For a more detailed
description of the data sources, what they measure, and their methodology, see appendix B.
Bookmarks