Is the World Becoming More Free?

As part of the look I'm taking at Economies, Religion, and Human Rights, I've started taking a look at the historical data FreedomHouse.org makes available. 

From freedomhouse.org:

Freedom in the World, Freedom House’s flagship publication, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. Published annually since 1972, the survey ratings and narrative reports on 195 countries and 14 related and disputed territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide.  The Freedom in the World data and reports are available in their entirety on the Freedom House website.

Basically, it is a ranking from 1 (best) to 7 (worst) for both political freedom and civil rights, and they use this information to classify nations as "free", "partly free" or "not free". I haven't yet loaded data on nation populations, so these are just based on the number of nations for each rating. 

First, political freedoms:

It's pretty clear that as far as political freedoms go, the world has gotten better. I'm a bit surprised to see how gradually the world changed. The only bit of discontinuity looks to have happened around the dissolution of the USSR. Since this is based on number of countries rather than population numbers, I think it's probably due to the USSR breaking down into many new countries, mostly with similarly poor political freedoms.

Now, Civil Rights:

With civil rights, there are a few more interesting periods. There's a big improvement in the early 90s for nations with poor civil rights, and another large movement in the early 00s for improving civil rights in countries with a fair amount of civil rights already in place. My guess is that the movement in the 00s is related to LGBT rights movements, and that the movement in the 90s is again related to the dissolution of the USSR. I would welcome comments from the more historically literate on other potential reasons for these changes.

Next up, creating choropleth maps to show locations for all these changes. Super-bonus-plan is to make a .gif that shows the changes from 1973-2012.

References:
http://www.freedomhouse.org/report-types/freedom-world