Carriers publish a dividend scale interest rate every year and agents quote it like a yield. It isn't one, and treating it as one leads people to buy the wrong policy.
The dividend scale interest rate is one input into how the carrier calculates the dividend. It gets applied to the policy's reserve, not to the premiums you've paid and not to your cash value. Then the carrier folds in death claims and expenses. What comes out the other end is the dividend that lands in your contract. Two carriers can publish the same rate and still pay very different dividends. The other two pieces aren't the same. What a dividend is actually made of is the longer version of that.
What you actually earn is a different number. It's the rate of return on your cash value measured against the premiums you've paid in. In the early years it's negative no matter what the dividend rate says. The cost of putting the policy on the books comes out first. It climbs, crosses zero somewhere in the middle years depending on design, and settles into a long-run number that is not the dividend scale rate. It's typically lower, and it's the number that matters to you.
So when you're comparing companies, ask for the illustrated net cash value at year 10, 20, and 30 on the same premium and the same design, and compare those. That comparison takes in everything. The dividend rate, the death claims, the expenses, and the design. The published rate includes one of the four.
Two more things about the published number. Dividends aren't guaranteed, no matter how long a carrier has paid them, and a long payment history is a statement about the past. And a carrier that raises its scale in a year when its expenses also rose can pay you the same dividend as last year. The rate moved, your money didn't. Once it's declared, what you do with it is a bigger decision than which carrier published the higher number.