According to a 2005 survey sponsored by the UCLA Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies found that a majority of Southern California residents have some degree of confidence in their local government, although they have less confidence in local government's ability to solve the problems that most affect them. Whites and Latinos have more confidence than other ethnic groups and Los Angeles County residents have less confidence in local government than residents of other areas of Southern California. Ratings of local government performance vary by issue area, but overall residents seem to rate performance as neither adequate nor inadequate but somewhere in the middle.