And back in the real world...
I found the Polity IV Project which tracks political freedoms in most countries since at least 1945. Its conclusions about the dynamics of democratization in the world are similar to that of Freedom House.
On the other hand it unequivocally portrays Russia as a democracy, with a score of 7/(-10 to 10). More specifically, it got 8/10 for competitive elections; 5/10 for executive constraints; and 9/10 for political participation.
This supports one of Da Russophile‘s central assertions, namely, that “The Putin administration has affirmed democratic values”. Indeed Russia unequivocally became a democracy in the 1990′s and Putin has simply smoothed out its rough edges, surely one of the most laudable achievements of his administration.
Interesting thing – note that Estonia actually scores worse because of their denial of political rights to one of the major ethno-cultural groups – the Russians! (They scored just 6/10 for political participations).
It also corresponds much more closely to the common sense of anyone vaguely familiar with comparative world politics (as opposed to Freedom House, the CIA front which caters to those who are very familiar with who is friendly to the US or who is not, as is evident from its bizarre assertions that Russia is more “unfree” than the likes of Afghanistan, Kuwait or Singapore).
This project seems to be relative unknown – I am an avid fan of different political/social/economic measures like this, the kind of person who looks at the pdf files with the methodologies that come with them – and I have stumbled across it just today via an article on Wikipedia. As such, this is a strong argument that its main task is to elucidate rather than make propaganda.
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