This type of analysis is subject to a lot of argument. You could argue that qualitative looks like this are prone to error, because if a country's change (in e

This type of analysis is subject to a lot of argument. You could argue that qualitative looks like this are prone to error, because if a country's change (in either direction) is slow and doesn't make the news then a third party is unlikely to notice and incorporate the change into their analysis. Okay, then the answer must be a strict quantitative analysis of a country's laws and scoring based on whether freedom of speech, ownership of property, certain protections, and whatever else is codified by law. However, looking at written laws often misses the reality of life- sometimes a country is a democracy on paper but one party runs everything and corruption is rampant. So keep in mind that it's plausible that multiple teams could do this analysis and come up with different conclusions. Case in point: I claim that the USA's 11 point decline in "freedom" from 2010 to 2020 is more of an indictment on Freedom House's methods than an actual shift in freedom. Of the three cited reasons in their "infographic" only one (immigration) has shown concrete movement in the past decade, and that only occurred in the past four years, which wouldn't explain a continued decline in the "freedom line" over the whole decade (DACA is from 2012, and certainly should be responsible for an uptick if immigration is a main contributor to freedom, and then a corresponding decrease as Trump unwound as much as he could). The corruption in politics and lack of transparency has always been there and has not seen any major movement (IMHO) in decades, certainly not enough to explain a 11 point decline. I cannot think of any continued slide in corruption or transparency that would have persisted for the last six year's of Obama's presidency through the Trump administration to make the freedom line decline monotonically as it does in their infographic. So then I have to think that either: 1) That line is totally bogus and is just meant to convey the concept of a decline, in which case why wasn't it just a straight line connecting the two points? Adding in a bunch of squigglyness if their data isn't that granular would make me suspect that they care more about aesthetics than conveying information in their infographic. I might as well disregard the rest of their report if that is the standard they work to, or... 2) Their assessment of freedom is wholly different from mine in the country that I live in, so if they can't even get that right then how am I supposed to trust their evaluation of all the other countries, so I might as well disregard the rest of their report.