Most Dutch Moderately Interested in Politics

On March 15, 2017 the Dutch electorate will elect the 150 members of the House of Representatives (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal or Tweede Kamer), the lower house of the bicameral parliament in the Netherlands. But to what extent are the Dutch really interested in political subjects? Two surveys by Ipsos Nederland and I&O Research provided some answers to this question.

According to a recent I&O Research survey, few Dutch are very interested in politics, the majority of the respondents themselves only moderately interested. Among the Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch participants in the Ipsos survey however, political interest is higher than the Dutch average, especially in the case of the Moroccan-Dutch respondents. The largest group of people uninterested in Dutch politics can be found among the Turkish-Dutch respondents, of whom 31 percent said they are not interested in Dutch political subjects.