The Cross-National Macrointerest (CNM) Dataset

The extent to which the public takes an interest in politics has long been argued to be foundational to democracy, but the want of appropriate data has prevented cross- national and longitudinal analysis. This letter takes advantage of recent advances in latent-variable modeling of aggregate survey responses and a comprehensive collection of survey data to generate dynamic comparative estimates of macrointerest, that is, aggregate political interest, for over a hundred countries over the past four decades.