Even so, a surprising number of other emerging democracies have met a litmus test of reasonably “liberal” democracy (garnering one of the two best scores on the seven-point Freedom House scales of both political right and civil liberties). Forty percent of the world’s states and about two-thirds of the world’s democracies (or 79 nations in all) now meet this test. And while the number and proportion of liberal democracies have hardly changed in the last seven years, at least they have not declined.