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Efficacy, Emotions and the Habit of Participation

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Abstract

Political behavior is triggered by the presence of a variety of material and cognitive resources, including political efficacy. The dominant view conceptualizes efficacy as capital, used to overcome obstacles to participation. Our theory suggests that unlike other resources, efficacy aids in the development of habitual participation by activating a particular negative emotion, anger. Using the 1990–1992 NES Panel, we find that internal efficacy boosts participation in part by facilitating anger, but not fear, in response to policy threats. This partial mediating effect operates primarily among younger citizens who are in the process of developing the habit of participation. External efficacy, because it is not self-referential, is not causally linked to participation via emotions. Finally, internal efficacy is enhanced by successful participation in politics, closing a feedback loop that helps explain participatory habits.

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Notes

  1. We acknowledge structural/institutional arguments based on registration or voting laws (Highton 1997). These important forces, however, are external to the individual. We focus here on the individual psychological processes that contribute to the development of participatory habits.

  2. Perhaps as a result the assumption that efficacy is resistant to change as a result of the campaign, the American National Election Study measures this variable in the post-election survey. This design choice limits our ability to model campaign impacts on efficacy using single election studies.

  3. Throughout this paper, we use the word “fear” to be synonymous with “anxiety.” The main reason for this is that the available NES measures explicitly ask respondents if something a candidate or party has done has made them feel “afraid.”

  4. The items are four-point agree–disagree scales. Balch (1974) identified two items as self-referential and therefore indicators of internal efficacy: (1) “Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on.” (2) “Voting is the only way that people like me can have any say about how the government runs things.” Two items were even more highly correlated, and were oriented toward evaluations of the system: (1) “People like me don’t have any say about what the government does.” (2) “I don’t think public officials care much what people like me think.”

  5. We ran several basic analyses (without emotions) with the four-item measure, and got very similar results to identical models using the one-item measure.

  6. Verba et al. (1995) include campaign interest and party likes and dislikes in the measure of general engagement. We leave these out because they are too similar to the kinds of attention variables that the recent work on emotion in politics considers a dependent variable temporarily affected by anxiety and anger. Strength of partisanship, on the other hand, represents longer term engagement. Including the additional controls in the engagement block does not substantively alter the results reported here.

  7. The exact question wordings were; “Who do you think will be elected President in November?” and “Who do you think would do a better job at… ‘handling the nation’s economy’, ‘handling foreign affairs’, ‘solving the problem of poverty’, ‘handling the problem of pollution and protecting the environment’, ‘making health care more affordable’, ‘and reducing the budget deficit.’” Perot was volunteered by 14 respondents as likely to win but inferior on three or more issues. Only 10 respondents felt he was best at three or more issues and thought he would lose. Such responses were not considered when calculating threat, since Perot’s chance of winning was characterized throughout the campaign as remote. When these 10 subjects are coded as “threatened” the results do not change. Therefore, the threat score was based solely on evaluations of the major party candidates.

  8. There were 11 respondents who felt Clinton and Bush were each superior on three issues, and inferior on the other three. We coded these individuals as “not threatened” regardless of who they thought would win because presumably they neither one posed a bigger threat than the other.

  9. This insignificant finding for external efficacy is important in and of itself. While Rosenstone and Hansen (1993) find external efficacy to be a much larger predictor of participation than internal efficacy, they are using measures of these variables taken immediately after the election. Since we suspect that the outcome of an election itself might exert a significant influence on efficacy evaluations, Rosenstone and Hansen’s estimate of the impact of external efficacy on participation might be inflated (as they caution their readers in footnote 14, p. 15).

  10. The negative coefficient on social institutions is unexpected. With the rest of the variables out of the model, social institutions have a small positive impact on efficacy.

  11. In an interactive analysis, the coefficients on the constituent parts of the interaction represent the effect of the variable when the other element in the interaction is zero. For example, in Table 6 the “winning” variable represents the effect of winning among those who did not vote (for whom participation = 0).

  12. This estimate is based on the simple calculation that the coefficient for efficacy drops from, say .80 to .72 (.80 to .72 = .08/.80 = 10%) among threatened respondents when anger is included in the model.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Ted Brader, Nathan Kalmoe, Michael Morrell, Greg Petrow, and attendees at the Center for Political Studies American Politics Seminar for excellent feedback. We also thank the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Participation and the Michael Hogg Endowment for Community Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin for generous support to the first author.

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  1. Mike Hogg Professor of Community Affairs, Department of Government, University of Texas, 1 University Station A1800, Austin, TX, 78712-0119, USA

    Nicholas A. Valentino

  2. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Krysha Gregorowicz & Eric W. Groenendyk

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  1. Nicholas A. Valentino
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Correspondence to Nicholas A. Valentino.

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Valentino, N.A., Gregorowicz, K. & Groenendyk, E.W. Efficacy, Emotions and the Habit of Participation. Polit Behav 31, 307–330 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-008-9076-7

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