Abstract
Most research on efficacy and participation in collective action has focused on single country samples with little attention paid to the relationship between efficacy and country-level structural factors. Drawing on value expectancy theory, we theorize a link between macro-level political institutions and micro-level efficacy. To address the previous limitations in the efficacy and collective action literature, we use multi-level, cross-national data, and present results from a series of hierarchical models testing whether efficacy increases collective action cross-nationally, whether political institutions affect efficacy, and whether the effect of efficacy on collective action is conditional on political institutions. We find that efficacy increases collective action, that certain political institutions increase efficacy, and that the effect of efficacy on collective action is partly conditional on the inclusiveness of a country's political institutions. These findings suggest the insufficiency of purely structural as well as social psychological explanations of collective action.
Highlights
Efficacy is a central social psychological variable used to explain an array of individual behaviours. Rotter (1954, 1966) originated the term ‘internal locus of control’ to refer to individuals who exhibit behaviour that is outwardly directed
We present results from a series of multi-level models testing whether efficacy increases collective action cross-nationally, whether political institutions affect efficacy, and how the effect of political institutions on collective action may be conditional on efficacy
In addition to the micro- and macro-level direct effects, our structuralcognitive value expectancy theory (VET) model predicts that the effect of efficacy on collective action will be conditional on the political opportunity structure, where efficacious individuals should be more likely than fatalists to participate in closed political opportunity structures (POS)
Summary
Sample We draw data from the fourth wave (1999–2004) of the World Values Survey (WVS) for 482 countries with a sample of approximately 41,810 respondents. The CIRI data contain a variety of cross-national measures of government respect for human rights in addition to variables which capture structural and procedural obstacles and limitations to participation. Organizational embeddedness is a count of the number of organizations to which the respondent belongs from the following list: social welfare service for elderly, education/arts/music, labour unions, political parties, local political actions, human rights, conservation/the environment/ecology/animal rights, professional associations, youth work, sports or recreation, women’s group, peace movement, organized concerned with health, and other groups Each of these was dummy coded to indicate whether the respondent belonged to the organization (1 = yes) and summed. Given a statistically significant random effect for efficacy, we add interaction effects between efficacy and the country-level political institution variables to identify if political institutions can help explain the cross-national variation in efficacy’s effect on collective action
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