I don't want to get into the discussion that we would have if we were having a seminar in political science, where we debate the use of interest as an explanatory variable. In many ways, it simply pushes the explanatory question back one step—saying that if you don't do things because you're not interested in them, then why aren't you interested in them? It pushes it back.
I think the research on voter turnout—without going into it at great length—can be encapsulated to say that for many people, particularly young people, politics, elections, and voting is a kind of marginal activity. But the thing that you find if you look a lot closer is that it's not that young people—although this doesn't just apply to them—are determined not to be interested in politics, it's that they want to be given reasons why they should be.
In other words, what we're used to considering as the traditional civic duty that we have, that you have, and that my parents had—you did it because that's what you had to do.... We vote because everybody votes and we vote all the time. We simply vote to express ourselves, in a way. That is often being changed into a more conditional kind of duty. To say that people will do things if it matters, will do things if there's a good reason to, will do things if they're well informed, but not if they're not well informed. There are ways in which the information that's being provided can help to stimulate one's feeling that maybe they should get involved.