Trends in Public Attitudes Toward the Government, 2023–2025

Dr. Shahaf Zamir

Evaluations of democratic governance are shaped by multiple, interrelated dimensions, including satisfaction with government performance, political trust, perceived responsiveness and representation, and assessments of the system’s capacity to address pressing public problems. Evidence from Israel between 2023 and 2025 under the current Netanyahu government indicates that these dimensions move largely in tandem, pointing to a broad-based deterioration in how citizens assess the functioning of democratic governance. While satisfaction with government performance occupies a central empirical and interpretive role, parallel trends in trust, attentiveness, and problem-solving capacity suggest a cumulative process of democratic strain rather than isolated discontent with specific policies or events.

Across the period examined, satisfaction with government performance exhibits a clear downward trajectory. At the beginning of 2023, roughly 37% of the public reported being satisfied with the government’s functioning; by June 2024, this figure had fallen to 17%. However, by December 2025, this share had increased to approximately 27%. Temporary improvements are observable following salient security or political developments, when satisfaction briefly rose to around 32% at October 2025, but these increases proved short-lived. They did not reverse the broader pattern of decline, indicating that short-term events have limited capacity to reshape underlying evaluations of governance. Similar dynamics are evident in political trust, which remains persistently low and shows no sustained recovery over time.

Perceptions of governmental attentiveness and representation reinforce this picture. Over time, a growing share of respondents report that the government is not sufficiently attentive to citizens' problems. For example, on average, only 21% of the population reported feeling that the government is attentive. These assessments are closely linked to evaluations of the government’s ability to address what respondents identify as the most important problems facing the country. Confidence in the government’s problem-solving capacity declines steadily, suggesting that dissatisfaction is rooted not only in disagreement over policy outcomes but in deeper doubts about the effectiveness and responsiveness of governing institutions. For instance, the average score that the public assigns to the current government for its handling of what it perceives as the most important problem stands only at 3.1 (on a 0–10 scale) throughout the entire period.

Political alignment strongly conditions these evaluations, producing pronounced and stable gaps between supporters of the governing coalition and supporters of the opposition. By late 2025, approximately 58% of coalition voters reported satisfaction with government performance, compared to roughly 6% among opposition voters. Similar gaps are evident in measures of trust and perceived responsiveness. At the same time, even among coalition supporters, satisfaction and confidence are far from uniform and fluctuate considerably across survey waves, indicating that partisan alignment mitigates but does not eliminate broader concerns about governance. This pattern underscores the coexistence of political polarization with overall erosion in key indicators of democratic performance.

Further evidence of this erosion emerges from assessments of political alternatives. When asked which party is best suited to handle the most important problem facing the country, only a limited share of respondents consistently identify a specific party, and these responses are highly polarized along coalition–opposition lines. Notably, the proportion of respondents who state that no party is capable of adequately addressing the country’s most pressing problems increases over time. For example, close to one-fifth of the population feels, during this period, that no party can handle the most important problem. This finding highlights a widening gap between citizens and the party system and suggests declining confidence not only in the incumbent government but in the political system’s capacity to generate effective solutions.

Taken together, these patterns point to a process of gradual democratic strain rather than abrupt legitimacy collapse. Declines in satisfaction, trust, perceived attentiveness, and problem-solving capacity reinforce one another and reflect cumulative judgments about how power is exercised and whose interests are served. The Israeli case between 2023 and 2025 demonstrates how longitudinal public opinion data can capture these layered assessments, revealing pressures on democratic accountability and legitimacy that are not resolved through episodic political or security developments.

Dr. Shahaf Zamir is a Senior Researcher and Research Fellow at the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility, Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Reichman University.

 
For the full review [in Hebrew] of Trends in Public Attitudes Toward the Government, 2023–2025.