Meaning: The indicator measures to what extent a country enacts personal autonomy rights by law and respects them in practice.
Source: Welzel's (2013: 254-263) personal autonomy rights index'' based on Freedom House'scivil liberties'' as well as Cingranelli/Richards' ``integrity rights''. Freedom House civil liberties are inverted and then standardized into a range from minimum 0 to maximum 1.0. CIRI integrity rights are also standardized into a range from minimum 0 to maximum 1.0. Then the average of the two is taken to measure personal autonomy rights. Measures exist on an annual basis from 1981 to 2010 for most countries in the world.
Scaling: Index scores range from 0 for the completely absent or disrespected personal autonomy rights to 1.0 for their full presence and respect, with proper fractions for intermediate positions.
Links: Data sources, rescaling procedures and replication data are meticulously documented in the Online Appendix to Welzel's (2013) Freedom Rising at www.cambridge.com/welzel (p. 72). Test statistics documenting this index's superior validity in comparison to alternative democracy measures are reported in Welzel (2013: 267-271).
Note: the missing code (-99) has been recoded to missing (.).
Type of variable: Continuous
Last updated by source: 2014-03-01
| Dataset | No. Countries |
|---|---|
| Standard time-series: | 192 |
| OECD time-series: | 36 |