What do you think?
Rate this book
Hooked: How Politics Captures People's Interest
Political interest is the strongest predictor of 'good citizenship', yet hardly anything is known about it. For the first time in over three decades, here is a study explaining what political interest is, where it comes from, and why it matters. Providing the most thorough description available of political interest in four Western democracies this study analyzes large household panel data sets rarely used in political science to explain how interest develops in people's lives. In an accessible manner, the book's analytical approach pushes applied social scientists to consider how panel data can be used to better understand political behavior. It does so in a way that doesn't gloss over complexities, and explains them in straightforward language. Advanced statistical methods are presented informally, accompanied by graphical illustrations that require no prior knowledge to understand the methods used.
412 pages, Paperback
Published January 31, 2019
20 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 3, 2019
Political interest is something that it ubiquitous in the study of politics, yet we know very little about it and we often lump it with similar measures (such as political engagement and political knowledge). Prior takes up the challenge of investigating the sources of political interest and its nature - a difficult task due to issues of endogeneity.
This book was very well-researched. Prior delves into a number of data sets and clearly ran a staggering number of analyses. He also very clearly spent a lot of time reviewing the relevant literature to come up with several hypotheses to explain various aspects of political interest. It is for these reasons, along with Prior's status as a prominent scholar in the field, that I think Hooked will be cited and discussed quite a bit.
That said, this book is a bit of a slog. The number of arguments and hypotheses tested, along with the plethora of data, makes his points jumbled. In other words I think this book takes on too much at once and it therefore makes broad take-aways difficult. Beyond the idea that political interest is dispositional rather than situational, many of the other points seemed obvious. Didn't we already know that education and parental influence would matter for example? Furthermore, I thought the methodological approach uncovered only a portion of the nature of political interest - the examination of political interest would have been greatly enriched with interviews or experiments to try to hone in on mechanisms and complexities, rather than only relying on survey data that mostly (though not exclusively) dealt with averages and abstractions.
Given these considerations, I'd give this book a 3.5 star rating rounded down.
As a final note, I'm evaluating this book as someone who's been trained in the social sciences at the graduate level. Someone reading the book without this background may find it difficult and dense - in other words, Hooked was intended for a specialized audience and not for the general public.
This book was very well-researched. Prior delves into a number of data sets and clearly ran a staggering number of analyses. He also very clearly spent a lot of time reviewing the relevant literature to come up with several hypotheses to explain various aspects of political interest. It is for these reasons, along with Prior's status as a prominent scholar in the field, that I think Hooked will be cited and discussed quite a bit.
That said, this book is a bit of a slog. The number of arguments and hypotheses tested, along with the plethora of data, makes his points jumbled. In other words I think this book takes on too much at once and it therefore makes broad take-aways difficult. Beyond the idea that political interest is dispositional rather than situational, many of the other points seemed obvious. Didn't we already know that education and parental influence would matter for example? Furthermore, I thought the methodological approach uncovered only a portion of the nature of political interest - the examination of political interest would have been greatly enriched with interviews or experiments to try to hone in on mechanisms and complexities, rather than only relying on survey data that mostly (though not exclusively) dealt with averages and abstractions.
Given these considerations, I'd give this book a 3.5 star rating rounded down.
As a final note, I'm evaluating this book as someone who's been trained in the social sciences at the graduate level. Someone reading the book without this background may find it difficult and dense - in other words, Hooked was intended for a specialized audience and not for the general public.
Displaying 1 of 1 review