Apathy

Apathy looks at first like a very broad, even vague concept. It plays, however, a very important and critical role in political analysis, particularly in the analysis of the decline in voting turnout and civic engagement and more generally in the study of participation and civic involvement of citizens. The concept is derived from a long, intellectual, interdisciplinary tradition. It was first proposed in philosophy but has been extensively used in cultural psychology, anthropology, sociology, and political science. The concept also has intellectual connections with other concepts or notions coming from the sociological and political philosophical traditions such as alienation and anomie. In a typical use of the apathy concept, theories of mass society have explained, in the wake of World War II, that modernization and urbanization have been responsible for detaching individuals from their primary groups (community, family, early socialization groups), generating withdrawal from the public sphere and lack of interest and motivation in public affairs. This entry discusses the history and recent criticisms of this concept.

The more recent perspective on political apathy started in the 1950s and 1960s, in particular with the publication of the book Civic Culture by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963). One of the issues of Almond's and Verba's political culture approach is that the stability of democracy and democratic institutions depends on a “civic culture,” a mixture of participatory, subject, and parochial orientations toward politics. The important point here is that this civic culture seems to allow many citizens to be apathetic about politics. Many critics of the book took this to be a kind of justification for apathy.

Since the 1960s, the political sociology perspective on apathy is mainly linked to the question of political mobilization and political participation. In a very challenging study of the relationship between social class and voting in the mid-1980s in the Netherlands, Leo B. Van Snippenburg and Peer Scheepers recalled that a positive correlation between social protest and income inequalities at least implicitly referred to the thesis of Verelendung (pauperization) that originated from Karl Marx's work. They also recall that this thesis states that under (relatively) deteriorating socioeconomic conditions, the deprived will turn to social protest and revolt. The thesis was later criticized, emphasizing that history has regularly shown the contrary: Revolt emerges under circumstances of relative social deprivation and is more likely to happen in middle-class or privileged groups rather than in deprived ones. According to these alternative views, instead of revolting against the system that generates inequalities, a form of “collective apathy” often manifests itself in deprived groups (Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazarsfeld, & Hans Zeisel, 1971). This doubt and criticism of the pauperization thesis was strongly formulated in studies by a very influential group of social scientists in the 1930s and the 1940s, the so-called Frankfurt School, in particular their study of the “authoritarian personality” (Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, & Nevitt Sanford, 1950). In this study, it was observed that during the economic depression of the 1930s, the workers and have-nots in Germany did not revolt. They instead remained outside the political scene and were apathetic. Parts of the middle class, by contrast, actively engaged in politics, as did the cultural and economic elites. In light of these facts, the Frankfurt School criticized the Marxian notion concerning the direct effects of pauperization on political radicalism. The Frankfurt School introduced an original hypothesis by putting “personality” as an intermediate variable between social characteristics and political consciousness, between class and ideology. In their view, belonging to a deprived group does not lead to active political behavior but encourages the development of an authoritarian personality (i.e., subordination to authority, conformity to rigid social norms, rejection of those not sharing these norms). Instead, authoritarian personalities show deference to authorities and remain outside the political field.

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