Americans report stable personal well being but declining national confidence

American reports of individual well-being have remained relatively stable over decades, but confidence in the nation has sharply declined. James N. Druckman and colleagues analyzed long-term survey data from two National Science Foundation-supported infrastructure projects: the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies.

The analysis examined trends in economic satisfaction, health, happiness, satisfaction with democracy, affective polarization, political efficacy, and institutional confidence. The data showed that individual measures like economic satisfaction, personal health, and happiness remained generally stable from the 1970s through 2024, though with some declines in happiness since 2020. In contrast, opinions on the country's welfare reveal a sense of national deterioration: satisfaction with democracy dropped significantly between 2008 and 2012; affective polarization (the gap between how much people like their own party and how much they like-or dislike-the opposing party) has increased by roughly 30 percentage points since 2000; and people's sense of political efficacy (their sense that they have a say in what government does and that public officials care about what people like them think) has substantially declined since the 1990s. Confidence in institutions and sectors including Congress, education, medicine, organized religion, the press, and science have notably decreased. Moreover, partisan divides in institutional confidence widened. Fifty years ago, Democrats and Republicans diverged only in their confidence in labor and in business.

Today, Democrats have more confidence in education, science, the press, and medicine, while Republicans have more confidence in the military, organized religion, and the Supreme Court. According to the authors, these trends paint a picture of a nation under stress and highlight both the value of sustained investment in long-term, reliable, face-to-face surveys and the concerning trajectory of American democratic health.