So, as I said, liberal democracy has been expanding in the world.

And if we take a symmetric to measure or signify liberal democracy, those countries that get on the freedom house scale of political rights and civil liberties. The freedom in the world's survey, a one or a two on political rights and a one or a two on civil liberties. Then, we see now that about 2 3rds of the world's democracies, 77 of about 116 or 17 meet this test of being reasonably liberal. They meet it in the sense that electoral competition is institutionalized, quite fair and open. There are no doubts about the freedom and fairness of elections. Civil liberties are reasonably well-protected. There is a rule of law with some degree of judicial independence. And levels of political violence are now contained and not perhaps absent, but significantly reduced. They're more of a rarity than a common thing. And abuses of human rights and the dignity of the person by state security services have been rained in, there's no longer impunity for state security service, services to violate the rights of the individuals and groups. These are all indicators of liberal democracy. What is striking about this period of the global third wave of democratization is how global it has been. It is the first period in world history in which democracy has become truly a global phenomenon. So that today, not only is all of Europe and North America, Australia and New Zealand, they're kind of old core of liberal democracy, completely democratic, and liberal democracies, all. But 28 of the 33 states in Latin America about six, about 85% are now democracies. Many of them are liberal democracies, though again disproportionately small states and the island states of the Caribbean. About six in ten of the former communist countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are democracies. Disproportionately, those in Central and Eastern Europe and the three states of the former Soviet Union, the Baltic

states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, that have been admitted to the European Union are liberal democracies. Of course, the other 12 states of the former Soviet Union are mainly not democracies now. Ukraine is ambiguous. Russia, unfortunately, has moved in the wrong direction. About 40% of the states of Asia, the 25 states of Asia, are democracies and almost all of the Pacific Island states. Keeping in mind again the tendency for very small populations and island states to be democracies and liberal decocracies. Today, about a third, perhaps slightly more of the sates of sub-Saharan Africa are democracies, about 17 out of 49. And only a small subset in the Middle East today, Tunisia has become the first Arab democracy in several decades. And there's also of course, Turkey and Israel. Here we see the trends by region. The presence of electoral democracy and liberal democracy, as of January 2013, as measured by the freedom in the world survey, which is available on the website of freedom house, www.freedomhouse.org. So, anyone can gain access to this data and evaluate it for themselves. According to this annual, annual survey of freedom in the world, we see that democracy outside the European and western part of the world is most prevalent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and among the Pacific Island states. But that there is a critical mass of democracy, some presence of democracy everywhere else in the world in eastern Europe, in the former Soviet Union, in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle-East, and North Africa. These are the regional trends in terms of freedom in the world through the end of last year, the end of 2012. And we see here some very interesting developments between the start of the third wave of democratization in 1974 and the current moment in essence, the most recent survey ending on December 31st 2012. First of all, we see here with the brown line, this one here, that the former Soviet Union, of course, was the most repressive part of the world for a time, and very rapidly improved up to the early 1990s.

And then, beginning around '93, deteriorated again and has deteriorated fur, further since 1999. Second, we see with the Middle East and North Africa, that it was by no means the most repressive region of the world. it had a kind of average freedom score of about 5 that got worse and deteriorated, not dramatically, but it did get worse, down to about 5.5. And the problem is that during the 1980s and 90s, the rest of the world improved in its level of freedom. And the Middle East and North Africa barely did until the period of the last year or two. We see that sub-Saharan Africa started in 1974 as the most repressive part of the world, say, for the communist regions of the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. And then it made a significant improvement around 1990. Again, this period of time when the Berlin call was crashing and the geopolitical freezing of sub-Saharan Africa in a Cold War competition began to melt down, thaw out, and free Africa to develop on its own terms. And this led to a very significant improvement in levels of freedom in sub-Saharan Africa. Going form 5.3 around 1990 to about 4.4 over the last decade or so. And, of course, we see as well that the communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have done much better than any other region of the world in terms of the improvement in the level of freedom. Which was very poor up until 1989 at around 6.5 on average and then, shot up very dramatically to 3.8 around 1990. And then, 2.4 around the year 2000 and now about 1.9. So, Central and Eastern Europe is a region now that's become integrated into the European Union and quite liberal and quite democratic.