Apathy -- It's Our Way

Interest in this year's Los Angeles mayoral campaign is underwhelming. The turnout for Tuesday's election is expected to descend to new lows. Editorial writers and good-government types scold us for our civic apathy. But their anxiety and hand-wringing are misplaced. Our stubborn indifference to the mayoral campaign is far from worrisome. Rather, it is a sign that the City of Angels in 2005 is in relatively good form.

Local politics has always been the last resort as a problem solver for Angelenos. You know that something is really wrong when we're paying attention -- and voting. The turnout for the racially charged 1969 mayoral contest between Sam Yorty and Tom Bradley -- the first election after the Watts riots -- was the highest in modern times.

In the early-to-mid-1990s, the city was again on edge. Natural disasters, riots and a nasty recession threatened our survival. Concerned citizens regularly tuned in to KCRW-FM (89.9) to listen to "Which Way, L.A.?" They read Jill Stewart's frequently acerbic column on local politics in the now-defunct New Times Los Angeles. Intellectual debate on the nature and fate of the city reached a new level of intensity. Concern for L.A.'s future sent citizens to the polls in above-average numbers in 1993.

Political scientist Francis M. Carney detected this civic trait in 1964. Space, water and sunshine provided Angelenos "a margin of safety" against the city's growing social ills, he wrote. "It is not that politics seems futile or ugly or threatening to Angelenos. To most of them, politics seems unnecessary."

Carney rightly predicted that when that margin of safety diminished, the people of L.A. would turn to local politics. What he didn't foresee was that after the city was rescued, residents would revert to their old, indifferent ways.

Political scientists blame L.A.'s sprawl and fragmented political institutions for much of our municipal apathy. The county provides social services; the city polices the streets and fills potholes. All this leaves some residents confused about which local political jurisdiction they live in.

San Francisco is the antithesis of Los Angeles. Relatively small, dense and with city and county boundaries the same, it has remarkably high rates of civic engagement, according to Richard DeLeon, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University. The City by the Bay is a caldron of social movements, a magnet for migrants eager to be part of the city's political mix.