One Cheer for Apathy

By Stephen Earl Bennett

The time has come to reassess condemnation of citizens who are indifferent to public affairs. For one thing, there are lots of them. Shortly after the 2004 election, the American National Election Studies asked a random sample of voting-age Americans how often they followed events in government and public affairs, even when there wasn’t an election going on, and only 28 percent replied “most of the time.” Even if we pass over the 41 percent who said “some of the time,” and focus on respondents who said either “only now and then” or “hardly at all,” we’re talking about 32 percent of the electorate. In short, somewhere between a third and approximately seven-tenths of the American public manifest only lukewarm interest in government and public affairs. One can trace this pattern back to the 1940s, at least.

We should not be surprised to learn that, most of the time, most people are not very attentive to politics. As political scientists Todd Donovan and Shaun Bowler observed, “politics is a distinctly part-time concern” for most citizens: “The demands of job and family, not to mention the appeal of sports, movies, TV, and a host of other things that compete with politics for the public’s attention, all tend to make politics a fairly low priority for the average voter.”

Wars, scandals, and crises, such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, can heighten the public’s interest, temporarily at least. Sooner or later—usually sooner—the public returns to its habitual indifference to public affairs.

When the United States is compared to Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Mexico—the same countries Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba studied for The Civic Culture, which was published in 1963—the 1999-2000 wave from the World Values Survey shows that Americans are more politically interested than Mexicans, Italians, and Britons, but slightly less so than the Germans. This was precisely the pattern found by Almond and Verba in 1959 and 1960.

When one considers Americans’ substantial advantage over the other four nations in terms of educational attainment, however—which affects how politically interested one is—a good portion of their greater political attentiveness, relative to other western liberal democracies, becomes doubtful. Only one-fifth of Americans’ formal schooling was classified as “low” in the 1999-2000 wave of the World Values Survey, compared to over two-fifths of adults from the other four countries. Half of Americans were said to have a “high” level of educational attainment, compared with an average of 15 percent of the respondents from the other four countries.

Apathy is even more pronounced among Americans between eighteen and twenty-nine years of age. In 2004, for example, only 15 percent of young Americans said they followed goings-on in government and public affairs “most of the time,” and 43 percent said either “hardly at all” or “only now and then.” By contrast, among persons sixty-five or older—former NBC-TV news anchor Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation”—nearly two-fifths said they followed political events “most of the time,” and only 15 percent replied “hardly at all” or “only now and then.”

Unless young people become more politically attentive as they age, and some evidence suggests that won’t happen, we should expect even higher rates of apathy among the American public in the future.

The ideal of the attentive and informed citizen is as old as democracy itself. The ancient Athenian statesman Pericles is supposed to have told his fellow citizens that in Athens—said to be democracy’s birthplace—“we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.” After visiting the United States in 1830-31, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “if an American should be reduced to occupying himself with his own affairs, at that moment half his existence would be snatched from him; he would feel it as a vast void in his life and would become incredibly unhappy.” And, as sociologist Michael Schudson noted, the ideal of the politically alert citizen was particularly strong among the American Progressives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It is not hard to find evidence that politically interested citizens are different from their apathetic counterparts. For one thing, they are more politically active. In 2004, for example, 89 percent of those who said they followed public affairs most of the time claimed to have voted, compared to just over three-fifths of those who were apathetic. (Students of surveys, such as the American National Election Studies, are used to seeing a sizable “over-report” of turnout.)

Political interest affects other activities as well. For example, in 2004, 35 percent of the most interested Americans said they had contacted a public official within the last year to express an opinion, compared to 7 percent of the apathetic. Over half of politically interested Americans say they are a member of at least one organization, compared to roughly a third of the apathetic. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has contended that membership in organizations is one form of “social capital,” which he believes enhances democratic vibrancy.