least initially) by relatively wide-ranging democracy. Measured by the indices of political freedom and civil liberties … liberalisation began-the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia attained the same extent of democracy as the United Kingdom or Germany …. Between 1989 and 1991, the average of the two Freedom House indices rose from 0.26 to 0.57, on a scale from zero (no democracy …

between other measures of democracy, based on civil liberties and political rights, and inequality. The transition experience …

divergence in democracy and political rights is 4 to 5 times larger than the divergence in the path toward economic freedom and … ease of doing business. Democracy is not harder to predict than economic freedom — history and ethnicity predict it well …