To Örebro University

By scrutinizing previous research, I offer a merger of the two research disciplines concerning the concept of political efficacy, i.e. the perception held by individuals of their own abilities to execute actions aimed at producing a change in society. Four pathways for how political efficacy develops, building on the merged perspective, are then tested in a single two-step hierarchical OLS regression. The results show that mastery experiences, role models, encouragement, and empowering outlooks in a political setting are predictors of youths’ political efficacy, over and above the effects of political interest and perceived political knowledge. This study contributes to theorizing about the development of political efficacy by discussing understanding of the concept, with input from both political science and psychology, and by empirically testing an existing multidisciplinary theory.

In the democracies of today, school often have a dual role to play. Not only should they give students the knowledge they need to enter the labour market, they should also teach young people about democracy, and develop students’ capacity to exercise their citizenship. A third task for schools is to enhance political equality in society by supporting the least privileged students. In this study, we explore how school can contribute to increased equality by strengthening students’ political efficacy. Upper secondary students’ political efficacy levels are compared over time by creating four groups on the basis of their educational choices and experiences of the school and teaching environment. The results indicate that school matters for the development of political efficacy, but not in the same ways for all students. Signs of there being compensatory effects of having a positive school/teaching environment are found for students on vocational programmes, but not for those on academic programmes. Moreover, the results suggest that classroom/teaching factors play a more important role than the social environment offered by schools.

The issue of some people engage frequently in political activities while others rarely or never get involved is a key theme in the field of political socialization. In this paper we study three of the main predictors of youths’ political behavior: political interest, political knowledge and political efficacy. Much attention has already been paid to the influence each of these factors have on political participation separately but few studies have investigated the potential interaction effects between them. Our study takes this step and explores the possible leverage effects of strong political efficacy beliefs in combination with high political interest orpolitical knowledge.

The data consist of a longitudinal study including 1857 youths at Time 1 (M age=15.03; 51.1% male, 48.9% female) and 1530 youths at Time 2 (M age=15.79; 50.3% male, 49.7% female). Moderated regression analysis in Mplus is used to investigate the impact of political knowledge, political interest and political efficacy on political participation. The interaction effects of political efficacy and the two other predictors are then tested using simple slope tests.

We conclude that, political efficacy and political interest show a significant interaction effect on political participation, while no effect is found for political efficacy and knowledge. In other words, the effect of high political interest on political participation is stronger for youths who also have a strong belief in their own capacity to perform political actions. A politically interested person is more likely to take political action if s/he also believes in her/his ability to produce a change in society.