(TNND) — America might be the land of the free, but Americans aren’t as satisfied as the rest of the world with their personal freedoms.

Gallup reported that just 72% of Americans are satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their life.

The global median was 81%, while the median for similarly democratic countries with market-based economies was 86%.

Just three years ago, 81% of Americans were satisfied with their freedom.

Only Pakistan and Croatia have seen a larger drop in satisfaction since then, Gallup said.

Gallup noted that its data was collected last year, before the election.

Meanwhile, American women are far less satisfied with their freedom than they were a few years ago.

The sharp drop in satisfaction among women coincided with the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and the fundamental right to abortion, instead leaving it to states to decide.

Just 66% of U.S. women are satisfied with their freedom, down from 81% in 2021.

Men are also less satisfied with their freedom, but the decline hasn’t been as sharp.

Seventy-seven percent of U.S. men were satisfied with their freedom last year, down from 88% four years earlier.

Gallup said 2024 was the widest gap in men’s favor in its tracking of this question.

Oklahoma State University politics professor Seth McKee said he wasn’t surprised to see the Supreme Court abortion decision loom large for how women perceive their freedom.

But, beyond that, he said politics is souring Americans’ perceptions of their freedoms.

“I think the bigger story really is this culture war,” he said.

People feel like the folks on the other side of the political spectrum are infringing on their freedoms.

And McKee said that’s a result of the high levels of political polarization in the country.

“I do think it is this idea of zero-sum, where if the left wins, the right loses. If the right wins, the left loses,” McKee said. “And we're just sort of stuck in this trap where we just – how about tolerance, right? I mean, that seems to be lost.”

Peter Loge, the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, said politicians have pitted voters against each other.

And that’s fostered resentment that plays into the diminishing sense of freedom.

“(Americans) think that they have less because other people have more,” Loge said, describing the victim mentality perpetuated in the heated political environment. “They're being treated unfairly, because other people are being treated somehow differently. And so, of course, I have less freedom because somebody else has more freedom, because they're getting stuff they don't deserve at my expense.”

Gallup’s survey didn’t ask people why they do or don’t feel satisfied with their freedom.

McKee said the live-and-let-live attitude in the U.S. has taken a hit in recent years.

And he said it took decades for partisans to build up as much animosity as they have for the other side.

But he said it doesn’t have to be that way.

“If you could pull the party labels off, I think there's a lot of common ground there that we could find,” McKee said.