Events

Past Event

PhD colloquium with Markus Prior: Hooked --How Politics Captures People's Interest

April 19, 2018
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
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Pulitzer Hall, 2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027 601B
The Colloquium is pleased to invite the J-school community to the upcoming talk with Markus Prior who will discuss the forthcoming "Hooked: How Politics Captures People's Interest," in which he explores the origins of interest in politics. Lunch will be served at this event and as always, the Colloquium is grateful for the continued support of the Sevellon-Brown Fund. Political interest is the strongest predictor of “good citizenship,” but we know little about it. Prior's forthcoming book seeks to explain why some people find politics interesting while others don’t. Analyzing about a dozen data sets, including panel data unequaled in scope and quality but rarely used in political science thus far, the book provides a thorough description of political interest in four different countries over decades. Analysis of panel data using graphical tools and statistical models reveals many purported explanatory factors with little impact and a few that shape political interest in lasting ways. The talk will focus on two of the strongest predictors of interest, parents and political identities. Markus Prior (Ph.D. Stanford 2004) is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Politics at Princeton University. His research has examined how people learn about politics, the role of media in politics, the measurement of news audiences, and, most recently, the impact and origins of political interest. He is the author of the forthcoming "Hooked: How Politics Captures People’s Interest" (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and "Post-Broadcast Democracy" (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which won the 2009 Goldsmith Book Prize, awarded by Harvard`s Joan Shorenstein Center, and the 2010 Doris Graber Award for the "best book on political communication in the last 10 years" given by APSA's Political Communication Section. Prior's work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Annual Review of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly and Political Communication.