Towards a Worldwide Index of Human Freedom

Human Freedom from Pericles to Measurement • 35
The innovative part of the argument is that proponents do not confuse
democracy with freedom but they argue that known threats to freedom
in the future reduce freedom today by constraining actions for fear of
future retribution. Therefore, to be free, one must be sure of “resiliently
realized” non-interference in the future. Only democratic forms provide
this, the argument goes. It is worth emphasizing again that republican philosophers
are not claiming democracy is freedom; only that democracy
“ensures” today’s freedom by lifting the threat of retribution in the future
for things said or done today which in turn acts as a coercive agent which
causes us to curtain our freedom today.
The “neo-Roman’s” two key assumptions also need examining. First, it
is true that if my actions today may cause retribution in the future, I will
constrain my actions, but if threats to future freedom do not necessarily
involve retribution, they therefore would not reduce today’s freedom.
Thus, for the argument to hold, one needs to make assumptions about
future retribution in both democratic and non-democratic societies.
Second, the assumption that freedom is best protected by democracy
is not theoretical a question but an empirical one. Certainly, one
could argue the future of freedom is more in danger in Hugo Chavez’s
Venezuela, even though democratic forms are being maintained, than
it was in Hong Kong under British rule, at least for the period that
British rule endured. This simply shows that there is clearly no oneto-one
relationship between democracy and “resiliently realized”
non-interference.
Moreover, empirical research suggests that democracies that lack institutions
and, even more importantly, public attitudes supportive of “liberal”
democracy, have proved unstable and a threat to freedom. (The key
empirical research can be found in Inglehart and Welzel, 2005. See also
Collier, 2009; Zakaria, 2003; and Chua, 2004.) In other words, if one
accepts neo-Roman arguments about resilience, then democracy, under
circumstances where supportive institutions and attitudes are lacking,
reduces freedom if the investigations cited prove correct. This in turn
means that the neo-Roman argument cannot be applied to democracy
in general, but only to a subset of democracies.
One of the key advantages of producing a measure of freedom is that
it will allow testing of the neo-Roman hypothesis and related hypotheses,
such as those that point to institutions and attitudes as providing a
stable, socio-political platform for freedom. An empirical measure may
provide (or reject) the empirical argument for including some measures
of democracy and/or institutional structure and/or attitudes into a measure
of freedom not on the grounds that democracy is freedom, since
even the neo-Romans reject this, but on the grounds that future threats
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