Macrointerest Across Countries

Abstract The extent to which the public takes an interest in politics has long been argued to be foundational to democracy, but the want of appropriate data has prevented cross-national and longitudinal analysis. This letter takes advantage of recent advances in latent-variable modelling of aggregate survey responses and a comprehensive collection of survey data to generate dynamic comparative estimates of macrointerest, that is, aggregate political interest, for over a hundred countries over the past four decades. These macrointerest scores are validated with other aggregate measures of political interest and of other types of political engagement. A cross-national and longitudinal analysis of macrointerest in advanced democracies reveals that along with election campaigns and inclusive institutions, it is good economic conditions, not bad times, that spur publics to greater interest in politics.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  British Journal of Political Science

• Publication date

  2025-04-28

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1017/S0007123424001042
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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