European Political Science Review
Who cares about politics under authoritarian rule? Evidence from China
2026-08-05
Departing from mainstream research on political interest in democratic contexts, this study investigates its evolution in an authoritarian setting. To disentangle temporal dynamics, it applies the age–period–cohort interaction model to repeated cross-sectional data from five waves of nationally representative surveys conducted in China. The results demonstrate distinct effects across age, period, and cohort dimensions. Age effects indicate that younger individuals consistently exhibit lower levels of political interest than older adults. Period effects reveal a downward trend in political interest among the Chinese public between 2002 and 2019. Importantly, cohort effects suggest that, contrary to the linear evolutionary predictions of modernization theory, individuals who underwent political socialization during critical historical periods—such as the Great Famine and its aftermath (1959–1963) and the late Cultural Revolution (1974–1978)—as well as those born in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, exhibit heightened political interest. These findings contribute to theoretical reflections on the evolution of political interest.