Abstract
What makes people feel influential in politics? While prior studies describe political efficacy as a stable and socialized trait, I argue that feelings of effectiveness in politics follow from the actions of politicians and the design of government. When state governments afford citizens opportunities for voice and deliver desired policy outcomes, I expect that citizens feel more politically effective. Using a set of unique items from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, I investigate how factors like policy congruence, descriptive representation, election administration, and ballot initiatives shape people’s feelings that politicians are responsive to their concerns. I find that people feel more efficacious in state politics when they have greater opportunities for political voice and when their concerns are reflected in the policy process.
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Notes
The baseline group includes independents as well as states with divided party control of state government. Only 15% of the sample resides in states with divided party control. Residents of Nebraska are excluded as missing data, given the state’s nonpartisan legislature.
Lawless (2004), however, fails to find evidence that efficacy is higher in states with greater shares of women in the state legislature.
Measures of the percent women in the state legislature in 2014 are drawn from the Center for American Women and Politics, while the percentage of blacks and Latinos in the state legislature are drawn from Stanley and Niemi (2015).
This includes states with direct or indirect ballot initiative processes.
Because the state efficacy items are in the pre-election questionnaire of the CCES, I use the elections performance index from the prior election (2012). Likewise, other measures such as partisan control of state government reflect the state of affairs prior to the 2014 midterms.
The sample includes respondents from all states except South Dakota. States are represented in general proportion to their population, as documented in the Supplementary Appendix. This reflects in part the design of the CCES, where state size is one of the strata for the sampling approach. Compared to a face-to-face survey like the American National Election Study that uses an area cluster sampling approach, the CCES can be better suited to examining state contextual effects (Stoker and Bowers 2002).
I conducted principal axis factor analysis with orthogonal rotation, reported in the supplemental appendix. The Cronbach’s alpha associated with the external efficacy items was 0.86. The Cronbach’s alpha associated with the two internal efficacy is low, given a correlation coefficient of 0.37 and an alpha of 0.53. While the internal efficacy scale might be a weaker proxy for the concept than we might hope, the main consequence should likely be a bias against finding results. Histograms of both dependent variables can be found in the appendix.
Survey weights are used in this table and the successive analyses.
As an item, it loads on the same factor as the state external efficacy items, but with a lower factor score than the state external efficacy items. The Cronbach’s alpha for the scale that includes the three state efficacy items is higher than for the four item scale that includes national external efficacy item. Given that alpha usually increases with the inclusion of additional items, this suggests that external efficacy about national politics is distinct from feelings of efficacy about state politics.
I find statistically significant intraclass correlations associated with state-level external efficacy (ρ = 0.027) and internal efficacy (ρ = 0.029). Because multilevel modeling relies on an empirical Bayes estimation strategy that borrows strength from other observations, the approach is amenable to cases where the sample size within state samples is low (Steenbergen and Jones 2002).
While a regression strategy assumes that the state-to-state variation in the effects of level-1 traits is wholly explained by the state-level covariates in the interaction, a multilevel modeling approach includes a random effect associated with the coefficient for the level-1 factor to reflect the unexplained variation.
I do not estimate parameters for the covariance of the random effects in the models reported here. Once the state level covariates are included, the variance of the random effects is near zero. This means that the covariance of the random effects is either insignificant, or in some cases, not possible to estimate. I also considered alternate specifications that excluded random effects that were insignificant. While such models have slight improvements in terms of model fit, the results of the models are unaffected.
Predicted values are assessed holding interval level variables at their means and nominal variables at their modes (white women living in states with ballot initiatives and a state government controlled by their own party).
An additional control for divided government was considered, but it was not a statistically significant predictor of internal or external efficacy. In the Supplemental Appendix, I further justify the decision to pool independents with partisans under divided government by showing that these two groups on average do not reveal different levels of state political efficacy. This suggests that for those living in states where party control of government is shared, efficacy is rooted in factors other than partisan control of government.
I also tested for the possibility that collective policy representation encourages feelings of external efficacy, interacting policy liberalism with a measure of percent liberal identifiers in the state as a share of those who identify as liberal or conservative. While people tend to report greater efficacy when the interests of the state align with state outcomes once personal ideological congruence is controlled for, the difference is not statistically significant at conventional levels.
I also considered whether the higher level of state external efficacy reflected feelings about the partisan balance of national government, by including measures of presidential approval and congressional approval. I find no effects for presidential approval on levels of state external or internal efficacy, while greater congressional approval is associated with higher state political efficacy. This suggests that conservatives’ greater feelings of state external efficacy are not simply a reaction against the partisan balance of national government.
In the first model that excludes the cross-level interactions, I unexpectedly find that African-Americans report greater external efficacy than whites. I am not sure why this is, but perhaps it reflects the generally elevated efficacy of African Americans during the Obama presidency or the quality of representation afforded by gerrymandered districts in the states.
I find the same negative and near significant result associated with two other measures of ballot initiatives in the states, using reversed versions of Bowler and Donovan’s (2004) qualification difficulty index and legislative insulation index. The frequency of ballot initiative use in the states is unrelated to state external efficacy. The negative sign is unexpected, but consistent with prior work that shows a negative effect for ballot initiatives on confidence in state legislatures (Kelleher and Wolak 2007). Perhaps ballot initiatives remind constituents of the limits to what elected officials accomplish in office.
This result is robust to the use of Bowler and Donovan’s (2004) qualification difficulty index and legislative insulation index, but not a measure of the frequency of use of ballot measures over time.
The marginal effect of percent women in the state legislature is positive and significant for women, but insignificant for men in the sample.
Instead of the percent black and Latino in the state legislature, I also tested the effects of a representation ratio measure, based on minority representation in the state legislature divided by the percent of the state’s population composed by that group. Scores over one indicate states where minority groups are descriptively represented in proportion to their presence in the state, while scores below one indicate states with underrepresentation of that group in the state legislature. I also fail to find evidence of effects of descriptive representation using these measures.
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Wolak, J. Feelings of Political Efficacy in the Fifty States. Polit Behav 40, 763–784 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9421-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9421-9
Keywords
- Political efficacy
- External efficacy
- Internal efficacy
- State politics