More than half of Americans say their government does not care about them at all, while far fewer feel that way about their neighbors, according to a Gallup analysis released Nov. 11.
The findings, drawn from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll, show 58% in the United States feel no care from government, compared with 17% from neighbors. That 41-percentage-point difference is among the largest recorded worldwide.
National wealth does not guarantee a sense of care
The analysis of surveys conducted throughout 2025 found a similar pattern at opposite ends of the national income scale: People in both wealthy and poor countries were more likely to feel uncared for than those in middle-income countries.
Across 140 countries and areas, 29% of adults said their government did not care about them or their wellbeing at all. The share reached 45% in high-income countries and 44% in low-income countries, compared with 25% in lower-middle-income countries and 24% in upper-middle-income countries.
Responses about neighbors followed a less pronounced version of that pattern. In low-income countries, 33% felt their neighbors did not care about them at all, as did 32% in high-income countries. The figures were 21% in lower-middle-income countries and 28% in upper-middle-income countries, compared with 26% globally.
The income categories describe countries, rather than the personal incomes of individual respondents.
Participants could answer that governments and neighbors cared a lot, somewhat or not at all. Adults in high-income countries were less likely than those in low-income countries to report a lot of care on either measure. Gallup said the combined responses placed high-income countries lowest overall for perceived care.
Government and neighborhood perceptions can diverge
The U.S. gap shows why the two questions measure different experiences. In Russia, the relationship ran in the opposite direction: 59% felt no care from neighbors, while 23% said the same about government.
Several Latin American countries recorded particularly high shares feeling no government care, including Bolivia at 78%, Peru at 77%, Panama at 74%, Paraguay at 73%, Colombia at 72% and Honduras at 71%.
Other high readings included Comoros at 83%, Madagascar at 70% and the Republic of the Congo at 67%. Among high-income Western European countries, the figures included 55% in France, 54% in Portugal and 49% in Italy.
For neighbor care, 48% in Ukraine and 49% in Bulgaria reported none at all. Both were more than 20 percentage points above the global average.
Discrimination follows a similar income pattern
The poll also asked whether respondents had ever experienced discrimination based on skin color, religion, ethnicity, gender or disability. Thirty-five percent in low-income countries and 31% in high-income countries reported at least one of those experiences, compared with 22% in middle-income countries.
The questions did not cover discrimination based on sexuality, age or socioeconomic status. Gallup cautioned that cultural and individual differences, legal frameworks and national histories can influence what people recognize as discrimination.
In high-income countries, 41% of respondents reporting none of the five measured forms of discrimination felt their government did not care about them at all. That rose to 65% among those reporting at least four forms.
Gallup did not find the same gradient for perceptions of neighbors, or a comparable pattern elsewhere in the world. The association does not establish that discrimination caused a particular response about government.
How the research was conducted
The findings appear in the report A Resilient Life: How Wellbeing Shapes the Capacity to Cope. The World Risk Poll examines perceived care as one component of resilience, including people’s ability to support one another and recover from shocks.
The source describes nationally representative, probability-based samples of people ages 15 and older. Most countries used telephone or face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 or more respondents. China used a web survey with 3,000 respondents.
Country-level margins of sampling error ranged from plus or minus 2.2 to 5.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, accounting for weighting. Those figures are not a single margin of error for every global, income-group or subgroup comparison. Question wording and other survey difficulties can also introduce error or bias.
The findings measure people’s perceptions and reported experiences. The supplied analysis provides no separate estimates for New York or the Finger Lakes.
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