Attention to many domains can be rewarding, but politically interested people stay informed, participate, and discuss issues with others. In Hooked, Markus Prior begins from this premise, presenting political interest as a “subsidy for democracy” (p. 353). Hooked tracks interest across decades and nations (the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and Great Britain), with a methodical, creative analysis of panel data. Political interest is revealed to be remarkably stable at the individual and aggregate levels. Prior concludes that it is a dispositional trait, evolving in late adolescence and early adulthood, relatively insensitive to political events: “The lifecycle clearly outstrips the election cycle” (p. 355).
Hooked proceeds in three parts. The first presents the central question of political interest’s origins and lays out conceptualization and measurement. Prior effectively situates political interest within broader psychological theories of motivational traits, defining it as an intrinsic desire to engage, an attraction, even pleasure. Readers get the first taste of the feast of data: Many available measures of political interest covary substantially and are captured sufficiently by a single dimension. Over four countries and six decades, aggregate interest changes little as events unfold. The headline is stability, as it continues to be throughout the book.
Aggregate stability is echoed in the book’s second part, which drills into individual-level data, investigating how interest changes with age and events, and which individual-level characteristics are associated with the development of interest during periods of change. A careful analysis of household panel data across nations reveals a common pattern of development; political interest remains stable over the life course, with the notable exception of late adolescence and early adulthood. After relative latency during childhood, in the teens, and early twenties, interest changes rapidly, though not for all people: “[W]hatever influences generate political interest, they happen more, or more effectively, to men, individuals open to new experiences, the young, and children of better educated parents” (p. 171). After the formative years, political interest stabilizes, remaining relatively steady even as people confront more and less interesting political events. The meticulous documentation of this developmental pattern is a standout contribution.
In Part 3, panel data are probed for the causes of political interest. Hooked consistently lays out statistical methods and results with exceptional clarity, and this part of the book begins with a gem of a nontechnical overview of panel data analysis; readers compiling methods syllabi or aiming to familiarize themselves with the logic of the method should give it a careful look on that merit alone. The depth of the results in this section exceeds the range of a review—education, parents, socioeconomic status, well-being, work, political and civic activity, marriage, and political attitudes like partisanship and efficacy are put to the test. Scholars working across all these areas of inquiry will find intriguing results to probe. Ultimately, Prior concludes that parents (especially mothers and two similarly interested parents) and secondary education affect political interest formation, mattering most when adolescents are first noticing politics. Beyond those years, political experience—voting and partisanship—have a causal effect on interest.
However, elections, postsecondary education, economic resources, political efficacy, and civic participation matter much less. In fact, many cross-sectional associations with political interest appear to be noncausal. In some cases, where results seem to contradict other political engagement research, it remains to be seen whether panel analysis is revealing cross-sectional correlations to be noncausal, short-lived, or whether causal relationships between predictors and other engagement outcomes like turnout do not extend to political interest.
Prior carefully assesses and documents a bounty of these important patterns, often leaving deeper explanation for future research. As a result, scholars across multiple subfields will find a seed bank of future studies in Hooked. Why do some events trigger interest surges but others don’t? Why are there clear relationships between key variables in one country but not another? Through what mechanism is interest in politics cultivated in some adolescents but not others?
In particular, Hooked is likely to leave readers curious about social group differences. The gender divide—increasing in adolescence and then remaining large and stable—is briefly documented but not explored. Race is conspicuously absent; the closest Hooked comes to an analysis of ethnoracial identity is an investigation of immigrant families in the European panels. Identities (other than partisanship) are given less attention because the book’s method relies on change, meaning variables that remain constant cannot be the root of a change in interest. This empirical strategy reveals stability and little sensitivity to the environment on average, leading to the conclusion that political interest is an individual, dispositional trait.
But perhaps political interest cannot so easily be disentangled from context. Attention to the position of different groups within the broader structure should feature prominently in future research building on this book. While individuals’ identities don’t vary much over time, the relationship between those identities and a nation’s politics do vary. When more dramatic changes to the sociopolitical order are featured in Hooked, we see that groups situated differently sometimes show different interest responses, as with East and West Germans after reunification and Black Americans’ political interest surge during the Obama years (mentioned in the book’s conclusion). Prior interprets the latter pattern as idiosyncratic. Because Black political interest returned to previous levels by 2016, he concludes that the case still shows interest to be an enduring individual disposition resistant to context.
Another interpretation is that political interest is substantially situational, but that it is hard to identify because the most important features of the larger situation—the sociopolitical order—rarely change. For instance, political interest shows a large class gradient. But because the relationship to individual income appears to be noncausal, Prior concludes, “[a] reduction in socioeconomic inequality might remove some obstacles to participation … but would not raise the motivation to participate” (p. 289). While money may not buy interest at the individual level, how interest would shift in a more equitable society is an open question. Similarly, other reductions in the overrepresentation of male and white officeholders may show the Obama-era phenomenon to be more than idiosyncratic.
These possibilities suggest that the field should not be too quick to locate political interest primarily in the individual. As an analogy, if I were to be surveyed about my interest in a different domain—sports—I would likely think about the National Football League and Major League Baseball, in which I am durably uninterested. I might indicate low interest in “sports” repeatedly in a panel, perhaps adjusting briefly during the Olympics or a women’s World Cup, mimicking the pattern of political interest in Hooked. However, if American sports coverage started to regularly focus on marathons and women’s soccer, I might start to regularly answer that I was, in fact, fascinated by sports. My interest in sports is inconsequential, but the high-interest class in politics is—as Prior convincingly argues—the self-governing class. The extent to which membership is a matter of personal preference or structural exclusion is a vital and still unresolved question. Prior acknowledges that stable interest could conceal spikes and dips in variation across different groups as political events occur. Of all the research agendas that could (and should) spring from this rich and carefully executed book, an examination of the interaction between identity and structural change in producing interest is the most important.
