Citizens around the world have lost faith in the United States, a new poll from Ipsos Global @dvisor shows.
Only 40 per cent of respondents from 25 countries thought the U.S. had a positive influence in world affairs today.
That’s down 24 points from last year, a statistic pollsters were surprised by.
“For the U.S. it has just crashed,” Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs told Global News.
He said across all 25 countries polled, the U.S. took “a direct hit,” and he has an explanation for it.
“It’s directly related to the change of administration in the United States, there’s no other explanation.”
Donald Trump won the U.S. election in Nov. 2016 and took office on Jan. 20, 2017. Respondents were polled between April 21-May 5, 2017.
Canada remains at the top
Canada’s reputation on the world stage was at the top of the pack; in fact, it’s the only country whose reputation didn’t decline in 2017.
Eighty-one per cent of respondents said Canada has a positive influence in world affairs.
But Bricker said this is normal for our country.
“We’ve asked this question for about five years, and every year Canada scores top,” he explained.
He said that our place at the top hasn’t been affected by federal leadership changes.
“Canada already had high numbers before and they haven’t really gone much higher, so this expectation that ‘Canada’s back’ and because of the Trudeau administration the world’s going to embrace us – well it wasn’t that they weren’t embracing us before,” he said.
France and Russia also experienced a sharp decline in their reputation (12 and 11 per cent respectively). Russia placed near the bottom of the list of 15 countries with only 35 per cent, while France ranked fifth with 59 per cent.
Another interesting statistic: Great Britain placed higher than the European Union, in the wake of last year’s Brexit vote.
How dangerous do we believe the world is?
Very dangerous, according to the poll.
The Dangerous World survey also asked people in the 25 countries surveyed whether they thought the world was a more dangerous place than last year.
Nearly all Brazilian and South Korean respondents thought it was more dangerous, while only 70 per cent of Chinese respondents agreed.
Canadian respondents were in between the two; 86 per cent agreed that the world was more dangerous than last year – which is on par with the global average.
This is nothing new, Bricker explained.
“We have consistently found over the last five years that the public thinks that the world is a pretty unsafe place,” he said. “And this is a consistent opinion across all countries.”
The Ipsos poll was conducted between April 21-May 5, 2017 using a sample of 18,055 adults from 25 countries. The precision of Ipsos online polls are calculated using a credibility interval with a poll of 1,000 accurate to +/- 3.5 percentage points and of 500 accurate to +/- 5.0 percentage points. The 25 countries polled were: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Poland, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United States of America.
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