Changing Levels of Interest in News and Politics in the Last Decade

• In Event: The Drivers and Variations of Media Trust and Distrust

Abstract

Individual motivation is often seen as the primary reason for why some people choose to engage with news and politics. In survey research this is typically captured by measuring people’s level of ‘interest’. If people are interested in news, they will tend to consume more of it, and if they are interested in politics, they are more likely to vote or participate in politics in other ways.

Data from the latter part of the twentieth century suggests that people’s interest is formed in adolescence through contact with friends and family, and remains largely stable throughout adulthood. However, it is unclear whether this still holds true today following recent events and changes to the information environment.

Using nine years of YouGov survey data (2015-2023) from 46 countries and over half a million respondents (n=671,754), we explore changes to interest in news and interest in politics over time. We find that (i) there has been a significant overall decline in both interest in news and interest in politics since 2015, and (ii) while declines are not evident in every country, they are visible in most.

If expressed in percentage terms, some of these declines are considerable. In the US, for example, the proportion that say they are “very” or “extremely” interested in news has declined by 18 percentage points from 67% in 2015 to 49% in 2023. Elsewhere, the falls in news interest have been even larger, such as in the UK where it has decreased by 27pp, with similar declines in France (-23pp), Germany (-23pp), Italy (-29pp), and Japan (-21pp) (though these changes appear smaller if expressed as the mean of the five-point scale). It is also important to keep in mind that in some countries, such as Finland and the Netherlands, there has been little to no change in interest during the same period. Furthermore, changes to interest in politics are less clear (in part due to there being fewer data points).

At the individual level we find that (iii) both interest in news and interest in politics is higher among older people, men, those with more formal education, those with higher trust in news, and those who use news more frequently. At the national level, we use random effects within-between modelling to carry out panel analysis that controls for stable country-level variables. We test for the effect of several possible factors that previous research has found to be important, such as levels of political polarization, news media bias, cohort effects, and proximity to national elections, but we do not find significant within-country effects. While we do find a (iv) weak positive association between levels of interest in news and freedom of the press, this alone does not adequately explain why there has been such large declines in interest in some parts of the world.

Our findings therefore highlight important changes to people’s motivation to engage with news and politics, and help us understand emerging trends such as rising news avoidance. But they also suggest that we may need to explore new ways of thinking about how interest is created and maintained, perhaps looking to the huge changes to the information environment we have seen in the previous two decades, and in recent years, a string of global events that—in contrast to previous events whose effects were short-lived—may have had a more long-lasting impact on people’s relationship with news and politics.

Authors

• Richard Fletcher, University of Oxford

• Waqas Ejaz, University of Oxford

• Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Oxford