Changing TV-Consumption, Changing Political Interest? Estimating short and long term effects using a pseudo panel approach covering 35 European countries from 2002 – 2012

Political interest is an important indicator for individual participation in political processes. Recently, several scholars have stressed how political interest is a quality that forms at an early stage in life and thereafter stays remarkably stable. This study challenges the argument of political interest as an unchangeable quality. We show how changes in exposure to television, and television news in particular, relates to individual change in political interest. Political interest, we argue, is therefore also reversible. We use data from the European Social Survey (ESS), covering more than 30 European countries, in the period from 2002 to 2012. To cope with the problems of misinterpretations in ordinary time-series correlation analyses, we introduce the construction of pseudo panel data, which makes it possible to isolate how individual change in television consumption relates to change in political interest.