Americans, Especially Women, Feel Less Free. They're Not Wrong.
Unfortunately, the data supports Americans’ take on the state of freedom in the world.
People around the world are, by and large, satisfied with the freedom they enjoy in their everyday lives. The exceptions to this trend are Americans—women, in particular. This could be the set-up for commentary from Euro-pundits and U.N. officials about American political dysfunction or the evils of our culture except for an important complication: By the reckoning of several independent organizations, the world is getting less free, and folks here at home are closer to the truth than are our overseas cousins.
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Americans Are Outliers in Feeling Dissatisfied With Their Freedom
"For the third year in a row, Americans are less satisfied with their personal freedom than the rest of the world, including their peers in other wealthy, market-based economies," Gallup's Benedict Vigers and Julie Ray reported of survey data on May 14. "While Americans have been less satisfied in recent years, satisfaction with personal freedom has remained higher and steady worldwide. A median of 81% across 142 countries and territories expressed satisfaction with their freedom in 2024."
Specifically, Americans' satisfaction "with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives" started falling after 2020, when it was 85 percent; this was comparable to the peak 87-percent median recorded in the 38 developed, democratic countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and a bit higher than the 80-percent median recorded globally. U.S. satisfaction peaked several times over the past two decades at 87 percent, making 2020 unremarkable.
As of 2024, after a brief and mild pandemic-era dip, OECD residents' satisfaction with their freedom stands at 86 percent and the global median is at 81 percent. Satisfaction with freedom among Americans, by contrast, has plunged to 72 percent.
Americans are rather less satisfied than their peers around the world with the freedom they enjoy in their lives. As it turns out, folks in the U.S. have a better handle on the real-world situation.
Freedom Really Is Declining
"Global freedom declined for the 19th consecutive year in 2024," Freedom House noted in its Freedom in the World 2025 report. The report called out backsliding among almost twice as many nations that slid further into authoritarianism as opposed to those that improved respect for liberty. It highlighted attacks on political dissidents and candidates, pointing out that "in France, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others, extremism or partisan grievances motivated physical assaults on individuals campaigning for office." And it also noted that "elected leaders in democracies are increasingly seeking to undermine checks on their power, focusing their assaults on the media, anticorruption authorities, and the courts. These attacks endanger both democracy and basic freedoms."
Likewise, the Economist's Democracy Index 2024 warns that "governments and political parties in many democracies have become estranged from citizens." In response to upstart political movements, the establishments in many seemingly stable democracies "do everything in their power to keep the populists out and to present them as illegitimate or even a threat." The biggest declines have been seen in electoral process and pluralism and, especially, civil liberties which, the Economist notes, have not recovered from pandemic responses "when governments responded to the coronavirus threat with national lockdowns and an unprecedented withdrawal of liberties." Political elites are maintaining their forms of democracy, so long as nobody really challenges them or wants to make their own choices.
The Fraser Institute's Human Freedom Index 2024 agrees "freedom deteriorated severely in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Most areas of freedom fell, including significant declines through 2022 in freedom of movement, expression, and association and assembly; and in sound money." Fraser sees some small improvements since then but adds that freedom "remained well below its pre-pandemic level." Overall, "87.4 percent of the world's population saw a fall in human freedom from 2019 to 2022."
That's not to say some countries haven't improved—a few have, in dramatic ways. And even in countries that have slid in respect for freedom, the fall isn't across the board. People may see improved safeguards for specific liberties that they value. But if you're comparing where we are now to where we were less than a decade ago, it's fair to say the world is less free, and that includes developed countries with established democratic political systems. Americans are outliers in the Gallup survey because we're right.
American Women Are Especially Dissatisfied With the State of Freedom
Interestingly, American women are particularly less "satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives." While men's satisfaction with the state of freedom dropped from 88 percent in 2020 to 73 percent in 2023 and blipped up to 77 percent last year, women's satisfaction steadily declined from 82 percent in 2020 to 66 percent last year.
The drop among women from 2021 to 2022 was especially sharp, and while Gallup didn't ask about the specifics of freedom with which people are satisfied or dissatisfied, the report comments that its "fieldwork in 2022 coincided with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision on abortion rights, a draft of which was leaked to the press on May 2, 2022." Men's and women's responses to the survey were similar before the leak but diverged afterwards.
Also, "women's satisfaction dropped most among those who approved of then-President Joe Biden," suggesting progressive women who are most inclined to support reproductive rights suffered the biggest drop in satisfaction with freedom right around the time that Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade's protections for abortion.
Controversial, long-debated, and forever in the news, reproductive rights remain a touchstone by which many Americans—women in particular—assess the degree to which they see themselves as free. The more leeway they have to make their own choices about reproductive issues, the more satisfied they are with the state of their freedom. Curtail their ability to make choices and they become less satisfied. This issue is and will remain a major factor in our politics (consider the weekend bombing of a fertility clinic, apparently by an "anti-natalist" terrorist who opposed bringing more people into the world).
That said, reproductive issues are certainly not the only factor. U.S. men and women alike reported feeling less free before the leak and then release of the Dobbs decision. Dobbs may well have accelerated that decline, especially for women, but Americans already reported feeling substantially less free even before reproductive rights were elevated back to prominence in 2022.
Unfortunately, Americans have it right. Governments around the world have made many of us less free than we were just a few years ago.
