In this project, we are exploring various facets of political interest. While interest is widely seen as an important predictor of political participation, we know much less about why people, either individual voters or the electorate as a whole, change their interest in politics. In the first paper (forthcoming at the British Journal of Political Science), we argue that the electorate's interest in politics waxes and wanes in response to the level of trust the public has in government. When the country trusts government more, we are less interested, but when we do not trust government to operate on our behalf, we pay more attention to what is happening. The conference version of this paper won the 2016 APSA Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Best Paper Award. In the second paper out of this project, we show that the political context, particularly the degree of polarization, the presence of a presidential election, and the party of the president influence the interest of voters differently based on their partisanship.
Principal Investigators: Joanne Miller Scott McClurg Kyle Saunders