New Article on How Political Discussion Shapes Political Interest across the Lifespan

I am happy to announce that the International Political Science Review has published a new article I co-authored with Kari Steen-Johnsen and Mads Thau (Institute for Social Research, Norway). It is titled “The road to citizenship: How discussing politics shapes political interest across the lifespan“.

The study asks whether talking about politics makes people more interested in it — and whether this relationship varies by age. We leverage a seven-year panel study of the Norwegian voting-age population (n = 10,695) to estimate the effects of political discussion on political interest and to test whether those effects change across age groups. We find that people who discuss politics more do indeed develop stronger political interest over time. Rather than being confined to adolescence, these effects persist throughout adulthood, only fading at retirement age. Young adults benefit the most from political discussion, which is consistent with theories of political socialization — but our findings also challenge the assumption that political experiences stop mattering once people reach adulthood.

I think these results open up exciting new directions for research on political engagement across the lifespan and on the inequalities that shape who becomes — and stays — politically interested. That said, we also find that the reverse effect — political interest driving discussion — is stronger than the effect of discussion on interest, so the relationship between the two is better understood as mutually reinforcing rather than one-directional.

You can read the article here.

This study was made possible by a grant from the Research Council of Norway. We presented an earlier version of this study at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and received the “Best Paper Award” from the Information Technology & Politics section.