I find this a rather inaccurate rule of thumb. Given the reciprocity fees many countries charge, is e.g. Laos a worse country for US Americans than Europeans just because they have to pay more? Also, what makes a country "worse" - This is a highly subjective term and e.g. given that Saudi Arabia is placed #39 what makes it so bad? Of course Saudi Arabia has obvious flaws in terms of basic human rights violations, but is this what defines "worse"?

@dirkk "Worse" can be defined by many metrics: HDI, human rights, inequality (Gini coefficient), etc. The nationality of the applicant is irrelevant, the index above measures overall restrictiveness.

Saudi has a high HDI, and your answer is silly and racist. It does not answer the main question about HDI. If Saudi has a different culture and you do not like it, that's fine, you have no right to call it "worse", and regarding the dictatorship, it is really not like that, believe it or not. Stop watching too much CNN and you will be fine.

Conversely, the US has a rather lengthy, expensive and invasive visa application system but doesn't figure in the list of autocratic regimes

@NeanDerThal I'm sorry to stomp on your home country, but fact is, Saudi Arabia is world's most repressive regimes, coming in 7th from the bottom in the EIU Democracy Index: yabiladi.com/img/content/EIU-Democracy-Index-2015.pdf Culture doesn't figure into this, and (not that it matters but...) I've worked there and seen the system in action first hand.

@jpatokal I have lived most of my life there... I think your answer is silly, and somehow racist, and it does not answer the main question. Visa policy does not show any thing, USA is an example as pointed out by blackbird. It's just your personal views, that's it.

Quibbling about one or two counterexamples doesn't change the very reasonable and accurate overall correlation that @jpatokal outlines in his answer. He's not asserting a relationship which holds in every case, but "a rule of thumb" in the world at large.

@blackbird I'm pretty sure this answer is agreeing with you, specifically the last sentence of the first paragraph.

Welp. I guess we Americans have a horrible regime then.

@enderland When it comes to visas, yes, you do.

@davidvc That's epic, except for one small but pretty fundamental difference: Henley Partners has the visa restrictions index (how many countries a citizen of X can travel to), not the visa openness index (how many other countries' citizens can visit X).

@jpatokal. Good catch! I'm very embarrassed. That's what I get for not reading!

@NeanDerThal North Korea is a dictatorship, while South Korea is a democracy. Both have the same language and race. Racism has nothing to do with these definitions.

@blackbird> good catch, US is missing in the list of autocratic regimes.

@jpatokal One quick point about KSA visas... They are indeed unusually hard to obtain even if you're coming from a high-HDI country. But few other places in the world have to process the sheer volume of visa applications (relative to their size anyway) as the KSA. They happen to have millions of people making religious pilgrimages there every year, and they import a very large portion of their workforce, so I would imagine the overhead cost to processing all those applications is rather high.

To chime in, a dictatorship is a form of autocracy; absolute monarchy is a different form of autocracy. I would not characterize Saudi Arabia, in political science terms, as a dictatorship, any more than you would say that about the ancien regime or Tsarist Russia. I think the post is needlessly contentious.