Political freedom, or political agency, is one of the central ideas in Western political thought and one of the defining features of a democratic society. It gets described in several ways: as a relationship free of oppression or coercion, as the absence of disabling conditions together with the presence of enabling ones, or as the absence of economic compulsion.
The negative reading
Most people carry the first version only. Freedom as the absence of unreasonable external constraint. Nobody is stopping you, therefore you are free.
It is a real part of the idea and it is not enough. A right you have no practical means of exercising is a right in the same way that an unopened door in a wall you cannot reach is an exit.
The positive reading
Freedom also means the exercise of rights, capacities and possibilities for action, and it includes social and group rights, not only individual ones. On this reading you ask a different question. Not "is anyone forbidding this", but "can this person actually do it".
Economic compulsion is where the two readings separate most sharply. Nobody is legally required to accept bad terms. People accept them anyway, because the alternative is worse, and a choice made under that pressure is not obviously a free one.
The internal constraints
There is a third category, and it is the one people like least: constraints that are not external at all. Social conformity. The pressure to stay consistent with something you said before. Behaviour that is not really yours, performed because it is expected. Political freedom is usually held to include freedom from these too, which means some of the limits on it are self-installed.
Where the law sits
Political freedom is closely tied to civil liberties and human rights, which in democratic societies are normally given legal protection from the state. Normally. That protection is a practice rather than a law of nature, and practices are maintained by people who are paying attention.
Which is the entire argument for paying attention.
