World Freedom Atlas

I don’t often write about politics, but some resources are too invaluable to ignore. One such is the World Freedom Atlas. The atlas is a fascinating visualization tool that was primarily developed by Zachary Johnson as his final project for his Geography class at the University of Wisconsin.

The atlas grades countries based on over 300 variables, including such things as civil liberties, freedom of speech, governmental accountability and transparency, the rule of law, freedom of speech, religion, and movement. Using color coded ratings for the variables, at a glance you can see the distribution of each characteristic across the world. Mr. Johnson derived most of the categories and data from material supplied by the Quality of Government Institute.

The Quality of Government Institutes’s Background page says

…a growing body of literature has emphasized the importance of good government in explaining peoples’ subjective well-being (Helliwell 2002) . Quality of government measures like low corruption, the rule of law, voice, accountability, and bureaucratic efficiency, turn out to be positively correlated to different nations’ aggregate levels of subjective well-being among its citizens (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobatón 1999; Frey and STutzer 2002) . Helliwell concludes his research findings in the area by stating: “The well-being data show that the effects flowing directly from the quality of the institutions may dwarf those that flow through productivity and economic growth” (Helliwell 2002, p. 31) . If Helliwell is right, “quality of government has a profound impact on peoples’ “system of beliefs”.

I don’t know that good government causes a subjective sense of well being, but there is a high correlation between the two. Thought on the information portrayed in the atlas is time well spent.

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