that between civilian-institutional regimes and state-created transitions, and militaryinstitutional regimes and negotiated (regime-led) transitions (see Appendix 1). It is evident, as seen in Figure 1(below), that change happens very slowly, and that, over the nine years since 2006, the Freedom House designation of a country changes very little. Whether Free, Partly Free or Not Free, this designation has changed little over the decade, and there is even a small trend for the Partly Free countries to be worsening, and a tiny trend for the Not Free to be improving. As pointed out above, amnesty was more frequent in pre-transition than in post-transition, but not significantly so. This suggests that amnesties are used in different ways pre and posttransition: pre-transition they are a device to make transition happen, but post-transition they operate to protect the transition. There are no relations between amnesty, either pre or posttransition, and whether the country is free, partly free, or not free. Clearly the consolidation of democracy depends on much more than mere amnesty: amnesty probably facilitates transition, but does not guarantee it. Figure 1: Freedom status, 2006 to 2014 60 50 40 Partly Free 30 Not Free 20 Free 10 0 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Since African countries were reported to still rank mostly amongst the Partly Free or Not Free countries on the Freedom House Democracy Index (Table 6 below), a contrast was then made between African countries in the data base and the rest of the world. As can be seen in Table 8 (over), authoritarian regimes in African countries had a preponderance of individualised regimes, either civilian-institutional, such as Zimbabwe, or militaryinstitutional, such as Ghana. 4.2 Comparing Africa with the rest of the world: For this comparison, the sample was reduced from 59 countries to 47 by removing all countries that had not transitioned after 198812 . One of the findings from the analysis above was that African countries in this sample were rated not free more frequently than the countries from the rest of the world in the period 2006 to 2014, according to Freedom House (Table 7 . 12 Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, and Uruguay 16