Freedom House

• 1. Introduction

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  Freedom House operates as a nonprofit out of Washington, D.C. For more than eight decades, it has weighed in on democracy, political freedom, and human rights worldwide. It was founded in October 1941, with Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt serving as its first honorary chairpersons.

  Today the organization is best known for its annual report, Freedom in the World, which grades political rights and civil liberties around the globe. Political scientists, journalists, and policymakers cite the rankings constantly. Just as often, someone disputes them. Governments on opposite ends of the political spectrum have accused Freedom House of the same thing: bias. Scholars have spent decades testing whether its scores lean toward the foreign policy of the United States, the country that supplies most of its funding.

  That funding relationship, mostly grants from the U.S. State Department, sits at the center of nearly every argument about the organization, then and now. How does a group founded to help pull America into a world war end up grading freedom around the world? And what happens to that mission when the government paying the bills changes its mind?

• 2. A Wartime Coalition

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  In early autumn 1941, several American groups pushing for U.S. entry into World War II found their campaigns increasingly overlapping. The Fight for Freedom Committee began exploring a merger among them. George Field proposed that each group keep its separate identity while operating under one roof, which he named Freedom House.

  The organization was incorporated on the 31st of October 1941. Its founders included Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, and New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Also on the list were Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, Dorothy Thompson, George Field, Herbert Agar, and Herbert Bayard Swope. Ralph Bunche, Father George B. Ford, Roscoe Drummond, and the novelist Rex Stout rounded out the founding group. Thompson and Dr. Frank Kingdon served as co-chairs, while Field ran the organization as executive director until his retirement in 1967. Field lived from 1904 to 2006.

  A converted residence at 32 East 51st Street in New York City opened as Freedom House's first home on the 22nd of January 1942. Furnished as a gift from the Allies, the nineteen-room building included its own broadcasting facility. It was described as a centre "where all who love liberty may meet, plan their programs and encourage one another." In January 1944, the organization moved to 5 West 54th Street, a former residence lent to it by Robert Lehman.

  Freedom House sponsored radio programs meant to counter Axis propaganda, including The Voice of Freedom and Our Secret Weapon, both broadcast in 1942 and 1943. Rex Stout, chairman of the Writers' War Board, used his segment on Our Secret Weapon to rebut the week's most entertaining enemy lies. CBS News founder Paul White produced the series. By November 1944, Freedom House was raising money for a building to honor Wendell Willkie, who had recently died. In 1945, the organization purchased a building at 20 West 40th Street and named it the Willkie Memorial Building.

• 3. The Cold War Mission

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  After World War II, Freedom House described its new target as, in its own words, "the other twentieth century totalitarian threat, Communism." Its leadership argued that spreading democracy was the strongest available weapon against totalitarian ideologies. The organization backed the Marshall Plan and the founding of NATO. It also supported the Johnson administration's Vietnam War policies.

  Freedom House was highly critical of McCarthyism during the 1950s. Through the 1950s and 1960s, it backed the Civil Rights Movement, and several prominent civil rights activists sat among its leadership. In 1963, the organization gave its annual Freedom Award to both Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers. That happened even though Freedom House sometimes criticized civil rights leaders for their anti-war activism.

  Andrei Sakharov, other Soviet dissidents, and Poland's Solidarity movement all received Freedom House's support. In 1967, Freedom House absorbed Books USA. Edward R. Murrow had created that program years earlier, as a joint venture between the Peace Corps and the United States Information Service. After the fall of Communism, the organization helped former Communist societies build independent media, non-governmental think tanks, and the basic institutions of electoral politics.

  Since 2001, Freedom House has supported citizens challenging existing governments in Serbia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Egypt, and Tunisia, among other countries. By its own account, it has partnered with activists from South Africa to Jordan and from Kyrgyzstan to Indonesia. That work has included bolstering civil society, supporting women's rights, and defending journalists. Not every analyst agrees with that self-portrait. Alternative classifications of Latin American countries, for instance, have produced results that diverge sharply from Freedom House's own.

• 4. Measuring Freedom

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  Freedom House has published Freedom in the World every year since 1973, grading political rights and civil liberties in 195 countries and 15 territories. A second report, Freedom of the Press, ran annually from 1980 to 2017. It sorted nations into "free," "partly free," and "not free" categories, based on print, broadcast, and internet freedom. A 2006 review commissioned by the Knight Foundation found Freedom of the Press to be the best in its class of press freedom indicators.

  Freedom on the Net, a newer report, tracks internet freedom country by country and covers details the other datasets skip, such as newly passed legislation. It has less country coverage than some competing indices. The Millennium Challenge Corporation used its Key Internet Controls data to help select countries for its programs. That practice continued until 2020, when the corporation switched to internet shutdown data from Access Now.

  Raymond Gastil produced Freedom in the World largely on his own from the 1970s until 1990, occasionally helped by his wife. Sociologist Kenneth A. Bollen grouped Gastil's approach with other democracy researchers as an example of expert-based evaluation. Bollen warned that this method was prone to statistical bias running in either direction, not knowably toward or against U.S. policy.

• 5. A Question Of Bias

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  In 1990, Gastil called his method "a loose, intuitive rating system for levels of freedom or democracy, as defined by the traditional political rights and civil liberties of the Western democracies." When critics attacked his work, he responded that most criticism was "based on opinions about Freedom House rather than detailed examination of survey ratings."

  In a 1986 report, Kenneth Bollen found no proof of systematic bias across all of Gastil's ratings, though he called the question still open. By 2000, working with Pamela Paxton, Bollen reached a firmer conclusion. Examining the years from 1972 to 1988, they found what they called "unambiguous evidence of judge-specific measurement errors" tied to traits of the countries. They calculated a bias of 0.38 standard deviations against Communist countries and a larger bias of 0.5 standard deviations favoring Christian countries.

  Linguist Noam Chomsky and media analyst Edward S. Herman argued that Freedom House judged U.S. adversaries more harshly than U.S. allies. As an example, they pointed to Freedom House's rating of the 1979 Rhodesian general election as "fair." The 1980 Southern Rhodesian election, by contrast, was rated "dubious," and the 1982 Salvadoran presidential election was called "admirable."

  A 2001 study by Mainwaring, Brink, and Perez-Linanhe found Freedom House's index correlated strongly, at least 80 percent, with three other democracy indices. The same authors still identified two systematic biases. They wrote that scores tied to leftist positions were shaped by political considerations, and that changes in scores sometimes reflected shifting criteria rather than real changes on the ground. Political scientist Adam Przeworski argued in 2003 that Freedom House's definition of freedom emphasized formal liberties over their actual exercise. He noted that only about half of American citizens vote, even in presidential elections. A 2014 study by Nils D. Steiner found strong bias in Freedom House's ratings before 1988. That bias tracked each country's relationship with the United States, and a weaker version persisted after 1989. Writing in 2017, Sarah Sunn Bush noted that Freedom House's definition of democracy aligns closely with U.S. foreign policy. She said that alignment helps explain why American lawmakers cite the group's reports so often.

  Academics Jan Erk and Wouter Veenendaal concluded that Freedom House's rankings overemphasize the formal aspects of democracy. They found the rankings miss the informal power relations that produce real deviations from it. UCLA political scientist Daniel Treisman pointed out that Freedom House scores Russia's political rights the same as the United Arab Emirates. The UAE is an absolute monarchy with no democratic elements. Treisman also noted that Freedom House rates Russia's civil liberties on par with Yemen, where criticizing the president was illegal. He contrasted these scores with the Polity IV scale. In 2018, that scale rated the United Arab Emirates at -8, Russia at +4, and the United States at +8.

  Political scientist Wenfang Tang compared Freedom House's rankings to the World Values Survey, which asks people directly how free they feel in their own countries. He found no statistically significant correlation between the two. Freedom House scores China near zero on its scales. Yet Tang found Chinese survey respondents reporting higher perceived freedom than respondents in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. In the World Values Survey's seventh wave, covering 2017-2022-72 percent of Chinese respondents said they were satisfied with their country's human rights record.

• 6. Money And Structure

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  Kenneth Adelman, Farooq Kathwari, Azar Nafisi, Mark Palmer, and P. J. O'Rourke all served in the past on Freedom House's board of trustees. So did Lawrence Lessig, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Samuel Huntington. Other former trustees include Mara Liasson, Otto Reich, Donald Rumsfeld, Whitney North Seymour, Paul Wolfowitz, Steve Forbes, and civil rights figure Bayard Rustin. Freedom House describes its board as a mix of business and labor leaders, former senior government officials, scholars, writers, and journalists. All of them are current U.S. residents.

  Freedom House employs roughly 300 staff members across its operations. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., it maintains field offices in about a dozen countries, including Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia, Jordan, Mexico, and several nations in Central Asia.

  According to its 2022 financial statement, Freedom House reported total revenue of $93,705,255. Federal grants supplied the largest share, $79,606,961. International public agencies contributed $1,055,339, plus $3,826,812 that came with donor restrictions. Corporations and foundations gave $1,873,651, with another $5,849,073 restricted by donors. Individual contributions added $1,487,190, and $2,901,964 in net assets was released from earlier restrictions. Freedom House's total expenses that year came to $85,530,680.

• 7. Friction With Governments

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  In 2006, the Financial Times reported that the U.S. State Department had funded Freedom House for what it called "clandestine activities" inside Iran. The newspaper wrote that some academics and activists worried the semi-covert work could damage other organizations' public, transparent efforts, and backfire inside Iran.

  On the 7th of December 2004, then-congressman Ron Paul accused Freedom House of running a U.S.-funded program in Ukraine that favored one candidate. Paul said the U.S. Agency for International Development had granted millions of dollars to the Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative, which Freedom House administers. That initiative, he said, funneled the money to Ukrainian nongovernmental organizations. He argued that many of those grantee groups openly favored presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko.

  In May 2001, the United Nations Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations heard arguments about Freedom House. Cuba's representatives called the group a U.S. foreign policy instrument linked to the CIA. They submitted what they described as proof of politically motivated activity against their government. China and Sudan also criticized the organization. A Russian representative asked why an NGO devoted to human rights opposed the creation of the International Criminal Court. The U.S. representative denied any CIA link and said Freedom House's government funding, through USAID, was fully disclosed in its reports.

  In December 2019, China sanctioned Freedom House along with four other U.S.-based advocacy groups. In August 2020, China extended sanctions to Freedom House president Michael Abramowitz and the leaders of the same four organizations, plus six U.S. Republican lawmakers. China's foreign ministry accused the individuals of interfering in Hong Kong affairs. The move came in response to earlier U.S. sanctions on 11 Hong Kong officials, themselves a reaction to Hong Kong's new National Security Law.

  Russia, which Freedom House rates as "Not Free," has called the organization biased and accused it of serving U.S. interests. Sergei Markov, a member of parliament from the ruling United Russia party, described Freedom House as "Russophobic." Christopher Walker, the organization's director of studies, responded that Freedom House applies objective criteria. He pointed out that it criticizes strategic U.S. allies among the 193 countries it evaluates. In May 2024, Russian authorities formally declared Freedom House an "undesirable organization."

  Craig Murray, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, wrote about a 2003 conversation with Freedom House's executive director. Murray said the director told him the group had backed off criticizing Uzbek human rights abuses. Murray said Republican board members worried the group was neglecting support for U.S. and coalition forces. He reported that Uzbek authorities had killed prisoners by "immersion in boiling liquid" and by suffocation with a blocked gas mask. Jennifer Windsor, then Freedom House's executive director, called Murray's account an "inexplicable misrepresentation." She pointed to the organization's record as "a consistent and harsh critic of the human rights situation in Uzbekistan."

  In the 2010s, American conservative institutions began accusing Freedom House of an anti-conservative shift. A 2018 National Review article said Freedom House had "changed dramatically since its anti-Communist days during the Cold War." It called the group "simply another progressive, anti-conservative (and overwhelmingly government-dependent) NGO." Vietnam's state media has leveled a different complaint, criticizing Freedom House's Freedom on the Net reports for accusing the one-party socialist state of lacking internet freedom.

  In 2025, a foreign aid freeze tied to executive order 14169 forced Freedom House to terminate more than 80 percent of its global programs. The organization laid off a large share of its staff and diverted funds from projects like Freedom in the World to cover other costs. Freedom House kept operating, leaning more heavily on private donations to make up for the lost government money.