Construct · 4 fields · 6 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one construct, two efficacies Nearest construct by meaningself-efficacycompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to political efficacy is self-efficacy.
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The original construct: the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process. Campbell, Gurin, and Miller introduced sense of political efficacy in The Voter Decides (1954) as a single attitude, measured by a short set of agree-disagree items and treated as one dimension running from powerlessness to confidence. They reported that it predicted turnout and campaign participation, and it became one of the most-used attitudes in the study of voting. The construct was born whole, as one label for one feeling. Later analyses showed the items did not form a single clean dimension, and the rest of this map traces how that one feeling was found to contain at least two distinct constructs.[1]
One half of the split: the belief that one personally has the competence to understand politics and to take part in it effectively. Balch's 1974 re-analysis of the survey items argued that the original efficacy scale was not measuring one thing, and separated the respondent's sense of their own political competence, later called internal efficacy, from their judgement of the system. Niemi, Craig, and Mattei built and tested a dedicated internal-efficacy scale for the 1988 National Election Study, with items such as feeling that one has a good understanding of the issues facing the country. This is the inward-facing component: it is about the self, not about government. As the later fields show, that makes it hard to tell apart from self-efficacy applied to the political domain.[2][3]
The other half: the belief that the political system, and those who run it, are responsive to what citizens want. Balch separated this outward-facing judgement from internal competence, and Craig, Niemi, and Silver's 1990 NES pilot work refined items such as agreement that public officials do not care much what people like me think. External efficacy is easily entangled with trust in government and with political cynicism, because all three are judgements about government rather than about the self; Craig and colleagues argued that responsiveness, an efficacy belief, and trust, a belief about the honesty and competence of incumbents, are separable but often blurred in practice. The distinction matters: a citizen can feel the system would respond in principle while distrusting the people currently in office. Treating external efficacy, trust, and cynicism as one attitude is a common measurement fault.[2][4]
The jangle: internal political efficacy looks a great deal like Bandura's self-efficacy, the belief in one's own capability to carry out an action, applied to the specific domain of politics. Bandura defined self-efficacy in 1977 as a judgement of whether one can perform a given behaviour, and it has its own page. Caprara and colleagues took the overlap seriously and proposed perceived political self-efficacy as a construct in its own right, with a scale about one's capacity to engage in political action. If internal efficacy is just self-efficacy pointed at politics, then two literatures have been measuring the same thing under two names, which is a construct-validity fault of the jangle kind. The open question is whether the political-science internal-efficacy items add anything beyond a domain-specific self-efficacy scale, or merely rename it.[5][6]
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