The Road to Citizenship: Discussing Politics Reinforces Political Interest

• In Event: Political Discussion and Participation

Abstract

Political interest is widely understood as key to explaining citizens’ political involvement, knowledge, and participation. Despite its widely recognized importance as an explanatory factor, we still know relatively little about the factors that enhance or hinder its development (Prior, 2019). Research suggests that a disposition for being interested in politics tends to develop during adolescence and early adulthood and then remains fundamentally stable throughout people’s lives (Prior, 2010; Russo & Stattin, 2016). Nevertheless, exposure to key political experiences, through either the news or life events, may trigger political interest among adults as well (Boulianne, 2011; Prior, 2019). In contemporary high-choice media environments, individuals’ preferences and motivations play a central role in whether they access different types of news (Stroud, 2011), or any news at all (Prior, 2007). Hence, understanding the conditions under which political interest arises, grows, and declines is key to disentangling key questions on the functioning of democracies in the digital age.

In this study, we highlight the role of political discussion as a potential avenue for stimulating political interest over time. Scholars have emphasized that political talk online and offline enables individuals not only to receive new information but also to express themselves politically (Pingree, 2007; Gil de Zuniga, Bachmann, Hsu, & Brundidge, 2013; Gil de Zúñiga, Molyneux, & Zheng, 2014; Shah, 2016). According to Pingree (2007), expressing one’s opinion may elicit important emotional and cognitive processes when individuals expect to be expressing their views, compose their messages with their audience’s reactions in mind, and experience other people’s reactions to what they have uttered. The increased social commitment that is linked to voicing and standing by an opinion may also lead to self-reflection upon one’s public self, and eventually to identifying as someone who is politically interested. For these reasons, political conversation has been lauded as “the soul of democracy” (Shah, 2016). However, existing studies focusing on the relationship between political expression on social media and political interest have yielded inconsistent results (e.g., Valenzuela, 2013; Moeller et al., 2018). Moreover, it is unclear whether political talk enhances political interest only among likeminded discussant (Mutz, 2002), or also when people engage with disagreeing partners.

This study shed light on the conditions under which people develop political interest through a five-wave panel of Norwegian respondents, collected between 2011 and 2018 and based on a sample representative of the voting-age population (N=5,000 per wave). We test lagged dependent variable (LDV) and fixed effects (FE) models predicting both interest in politics as a function of political discussion and political discussion as a function of interest in politics. Our key findings are consistent across both types of models, which enable to account for potential sources of bias deriving from both omitted dynamic variables (i.e., individuals’ own political interest trajectories) and omitted unit-constant variables (i.e., stable differences between individuals).

Our models show that interest in politics predicts political discussion, but, crucially, the reverse is also true. Discussing politics and trying to persuade others to support one’s views enhance individuals’ political interest in the long term. These effects occur across all age cohorts but are stronger among younger respondents., suggesting that the new avenues for political talk provided by digital media may be particularly beneficial to nurture political involvement among the youth. Moreover, the effects of political discussion on political interest do not consistently vary depending on whether respondents talk about politics with people that agree or disagree with them, and whether they experienced negative or positive feelings as a result of these interactions. Hence, we find little evidence that uncomfortable encounters with disagreeing discussion partners depresses political involvement, at least when it comes to its implications for of interest in politics.

Our results shed new light on the factors that enhance people’s political involvement in contemporary media environments. To the extent that individuals find and take advantage of opportunities to express themselves, discuss politics, and try to persuade others, their identities as citizens become stronger and their interest in politics – a key predictor of political knowledge, involvement, and participation – grows as a result. Thus, the road to democratic self-governance involves dialogue and debate among citizens, in both homogeneous and heterogenous setting and across online and face-to-face environments.

Authors

• Cristian Vaccari, Loughborough University

• Kari Steen-Johnsen, Institute for Social Research

• Mads Thau, Institute for Social Research