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Abstract
Citizens who are interested in politics are far more likely to engage in a wide variety of political acts than their disinterested peers. They also develop deeper stores of political knowledge and sophistication. Interest thus plays a critical role in explaining outcomes deeply important to both political scientists and the mass public. However, political scientists actually know very little about political interest—how it develops why it varies, and how to stimulate more of it. In this dissertation, I develop a causal theory for understanding political interest. The core component of this theory is motives; without understanding the goals that citizens connect, or fail to connect, to political engagement, we ultimately cannot understand variation in political interest. I investigate the role of goals in three empirical chapters. In Chapter Three, I show that personal values structure what individuals think politics is about and also their resulting interest. In Chapter Four, I demonstrate that connecting political engagement to the goal of social relationship formation concomitantly strongly stimulates enhanced interest especially among individuals with low levels of external efficacy. Finally, in Chapter Five, I show that the way the news media covers or frames politics deeply matters as different news frames vary in their ability to both catch and hold interest when politics is faced with competition from entertainment alternatives. This thus synthesizes previous research from political science, psychology, sociology, and communication studies to offer, and test, the first comprehensive theory of political interest development.
