HRF’s Tyranny Tracker Launch Booklet

When HRF was founded in 2005, it focused predominantly on calling attention to the abuses of authoritarian regimes in Latin America. Over time, and with the emergence of our flagship Oslo Freedom Forum in 2009, HRF expanded its mission statement — and its accompanying legal advocacy, programs, campaigns, and events — to be global in scope.

With this shift, and facing the situation that, in our view, existing quantitative global democracy indexes unwittingly skewed results toward inconsistency or overinclusion, HRF incrementally developed its own “Tyranny Tracker” — a qualitative democracy index based on a proprietary methodology that guides our political regime analysis and ultimately leads to the definitive list of authoritarian regimes that are the target of our work.

The Tyranny Tracker’s methodology is heavily informed by political science literature as much as by our two-decade- long experience advocating on behalf of dissidents before international legal institutions. Underpinning our analysis on the core classical liberal pillars of electoral competition, freedom of dissent, and institutional accountability, we classify all national governments in the world as democratic, hybrid authoritarian, or fully authoritarian regimes, and choose to focus our work on the last two regime types.

We designed the Tyranny Tracker as a resource for a target audience that goes beyond the academic world, with a view to inform the action of (a) philanthropists looking for systemically worthy causes to invest in, (b) asset managers and business leaders seeking to track and minimize their exposure to the whims of tyrants, (c) policymakers in democracies seeking to identify what regimes to shortlist for sanctions and to comprehend the nature of the refugee crises they face, (d) journalists seeking to cover countries and issues that would otherwise go unnoticed, and (e) pro-democracy activists worldwide looking for a one-stop tool to persuade global leaders to be tougher on tyrants while standing in solidarity with the people they oppress.