Putting the Political in Political Interest: The Conditional Effect of Politics on Citizens’ Interest in Politics

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221139757
• Author: Joanne M. Miller,David A. M. Peterson,Kyle L. Saunders,Scott D. McClurg
• Date: 01 July 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(4) 510–524

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221139757

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Putting the Political in Political Interest: The

Conditional Effect of Politics on Citizens’

Interest in Politics

Joanne M. Miller

1

, David A. M. Peterson

2

, Kyle L. Saunders

3

, and Scott D. McClurg

4

Abstract

Given that political interest is one of the best predictors of political participation, it remains curious that the causes of interest

are undertheorized and understudied. Notably absent from much of the research on political interest is an exploration of how

variations in the nature of politics itself might have an impact on individual-level political interest. We develop a theory and a set

of testable predictions about how partisanship interacts with the presence of a presidential (vs. midterm) election, the party of

the sitting president, and elite polarization, to affect political interest. We report multilevel models that use ANES measures of

political interest and partisanship and the DW-NOMINATE Senate polarization measure (from 1960 to 2008) and discuss the

implications of our f‌indings for the long-term prospects of an interested electorate.

Keywords

political interest, partisanship, elite polarization

Introduction

In 2005, The American Political Science Association (APSA)

Task Force on Civic Engagement concluded: “it is perplexing

that political scientists have not shown more recent interest,

as it were, in political interest”(Macedo et al., 2005, 35).

Despite the marked importance of political interest as a strong

predicting covariate of essentially every form of political

participation, strikingly little attention has been paid to de-

veloping a theory about the individual-level antecedents of

political interest.

In this paper, we build on previous research that takes up

this call (e.g., Prior, 2018; see also Prior, 2010) to explore

whether the changing nature of American politics affects who

expresses an interest in politics. In particular, we ask: Are the

f‌luctuations in interest that exist essentially stochastic noise,

or can they be explained by individual-level and/or contextual

variables? In short, is there a political explanation for political

interest? Specif‌ically, we theorize about the potential effects

of three aspects of the political context: elite polarization, the

presence of a presidential election, and the party of the sitting

president, on micro-level political interest. We argue that the

reason extant research has not identif‌ied substantive effects of

political context on interest is because past research has

overlooked a critical individual-level moderator: partisan-

ship. In doing so, we add to a growing body of literature that

examines the interaction of macro- and micro-level factors in

affecting individuals’political attitudes and behaviors (e.g.,

Druckman et al., 2020;Federico & Malka, 2018;Ondercin

et al., 2011).

To begin, we brief‌ly review the current state of the lit-

erature on the conceptualization of political interest, and

make the argument that we actually know little about

whether, and how, political context affects individual-level

interest. We then review the evidence about the effect of

partisanship on political interest and theorize that partisanship

should moderate the effects of three political context

variables—the presence of a presidential election, the party of

the sitting president, and elite polarization—on individual-

level political interest. We hypothesize that the presence of a

presidential election should lead to a corresponding increase

in the political interest of independents compared to their

partisan counterparts and that partisans’political interest will

1

Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of

Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

2

Department of Political Science, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

3

Department of Political Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins,

CO, USA

4

School of Journalism and Advertising, Southern Illinois University,

Carbondale, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Joanne Miller, Department of Political Science and International Relations,

University of Delaware, 347 Smith Hall, 18 Amstel Ave, Newark, DE 19716,

USA.

Email: jomiller@udel.edu