External Efficacy Research Articles

Temporary Disenfranchisement: Negative Side Effects of Lowering the Voting Age

How does losing one’s right to vote again after having been eligible to vote before affect political fundamentals such as political efficacy? We draw attention to the hitherto neglected phenomenon “temporary disenfranchisement,” which, for instance, occurs regularly in states that extended the franchise to underage citizens in some but not all elections. If an election with voting age 16 is closely followed by an election with voting age 18, underage voters who are eligible for the former will have no right to vote in the latter. Using original panel data on young citizens in Germany and a differences-in-differences design, we find that temporary disenfranchisement results in a decrease in external efficacy, which remains even after regaining eligibility. Our findings highlight an important side effect of selective voting rights extensions and bear insights that are relevant to other cases of temporary disenfranchisement due to residential mobility, citizenship, or felony disenfranchisement.

Political Disaffection in the Digital Age: The Use of Social Media and the Gap in Internal and External Efficacy

This work analyzes the relationship between social media use and the development of internal and external political efficacy, using five 1,650-person polls conducted in 2017–2021 in the 10 most populated municipalities of in the Valparaiso Region in Chile, a country characterized by high levels of political discontent and social protests, especially in 2019. With Structural Equation Models, we report positive impacts of different magnitudes of the civic use of social media on internal and external efficacy and no effect of the non-civic use of social media on either type of efficacy. As lower internal and external political efficacy feeds political disaffection, the differentiated use of social media can deepen the gap between engaged and disaffected citizens.

Extraversion and External Efficacy: The Moderating Role of Corruption

Perceptions of governmental responsiveness matter because of their influence on the willingness of citizens to participate in politics and thereby express their interests and hold policymakers accountable. Where do external efficacy attitudes emerge? In recent years, scholars have examined this question by turning to personality traits, especially extraversion. Extant studies reveal a positive relationship between extraversion and external efficacy, but thus far they have focused on high‐income democracies. How consistent are findings across countries with varying levels of political and economic development? In my view, the answer depends on the level of corruption and its implications for external efficacy. Where low (high) levels of bribery and other forms of malfeasance enable (impede) public influence on governmental decision‐making, greater levels of extraversion will increase (decrease) perceptions of governmental responsiveness. I test my hypothesis with three sources of nationally representative survey data that include countries from North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. My results have implications for the quality of democracy.

유아교사의 교직에 대한 열정이 행복감에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구

This study attempted to examine the mediating effect of teacher efficacy in the effect of earlychildhood teachers' passion for teaching on happiness. The subjects of the study were 220infant teachers working at daycare centers in Daegu, and the collected data were analyzed usingSPSS 25.0, hierarchical regression analysis, and Sobel verification method.. Data was collectedand analyzed correlation, hierarchical multiple regression and sobel test. The results of thisstudy are as follows. First, it was found that there was a significant positive correlation betweenearly childhood teachers' passion for teaching, teacher efficacy, and happiness. Second, amongthe sub-areas of passion for teaching, passion and harmonious passion were found to have apositive effect on external happiness, internal happiness, and self-regulation happiness throughteacher efficacy.

The Influence of Political Efficacy on Voter Turnout in South Africa

ABSTRACT South Africa's recent democratic elections have witnessed a decline in political participation. Yet few studies examine the influence of political efficacy on the decision to participate. Using 2014 and 2019 post-election public opinion survey data captured after these respective national and provincial elections, the paper addresses a research gap by demonstrating a relationship between a respondent's level of internal and external political efficacy and their likelihood of voting across two consecutive elections. It finds that external political efficacy, and to a lesser extent, internal efficacy shapes the decision to vote. The responsiveness of the political system is a key determinant of voting even after other key predictors of participation are accounted for. It concludes that years of state-based failures have eroded citizen perceptions of political system responsiveness which has, in turn, undermined how citizens perceive the utility of their vote.

Agamben’in İstisna Hali Olarak Pandemi Döneminde Dışsal Siyasal Etkililik: Sosyal Etki Teori Çerçevesinde Bir İnceleme

Bu çalışmada Agamben’in “İstisna Hali” kavramından yola çıkılarak pandemi döneminde alınan ve uygulamaya konan önleyici ve ihtiyati tedbirlerin Sosyal Etki Teorisi çerçevesinde üniversite öğrencilerinin Dışsal Siyasal Etkililik duygularında nasıl bir değişiklik yarattığı sorusunun cevabını bulmaya yönelik olarak hazırlanmıştır. Bu çerçevede bir üniversite öğrencileri üzerinde alan araştırması yapılmış ve elde edilen veriler SPSS 23 yazılımı yardımıyla uyum analizi kullanılmak suretiyle değerlendirilmiştir. Bu değerlendirmeler sonucunda siyasal iktidara ve dolayısıyla kazanan partilere yakın duran bireylerin dışsal siyasal etkililikleri yüksek iken muhalif siyasal partilere destek verenlerin düşük olduğu gözlemlenmiştir. Ancak açık uçlu olarak sorduğumuz sorulardan anlaşıldığı kadarıyla da öğrencilerin bu süreci genel olarak siyasetin dışında, olduğundan çok daha kapsamlı bir “istisna hali” olarak algıladıkları anlaşılmıştır.

The Impact of News Trust and Scandal Knowledge on Political Efficacy

The Trump-era political environment in the United States is characterized by changes to our information environment, specifically discourse surrounding so-called "fake news," and knowledge of political scandals. We explore whether news trust or knowledge of Trump administration scandals impact individuals’ levels of internal, information, and external political efficacy. We find significant and surprising relationships between these measures and political efficacy outcomes. Results contribute to our understanding of how political efficacy is responsive to changes in the political environment.

Weak agency and preferences for participatory democracy: discourses of Spanish people in positions of socioeconomic disadvantage

ABSTRACT Recent studies exploring public opinion on participatory democracy show that disadvantaged social groups tend to hold favourable views on participatory processes. At the same time, research has also found that these groups frequently express feelings of weak agency and lack of competence to make valuable contributions to political processes. How then is support for democratic participation to be understood, if people see themselves as unskilled and incapable agents? To address this question, a series of focus groups were conducted with young, middle-aged, and older Spanish adults in situations of socioeconomic disadvantage. Like other studies, the analysis found that the participants had positive views of participatory reforms, but this was modified by low levels of personal and collective agency (internal and external efficacy and horizontal mistrust). While some scholars argue that such ambivalence is coherent with populism, the analysis suggests that many participants (particularly younger and middle-aged adults) are keenly appreciative of the complexity of such proposals and that negativity relates to the implementation of participative processes without genuine redistribution of knowledge and power, as well as a lack of mechanisms to guarantee responsiveness and commitment to bottom-up democracy.

The Effects of Political Attitudes on Affective Polarization: Survey Evidence from 165 Elections

How do individual-level political attitudes influence affective polarization on a global scale? This article contributes to the debate on the social distance of party affect by testing a set of hypotheses in 165 elections across the world. With a sample of over 170,000 voters, the results of multilevel mixed-effects regressions demonstrate that ideological radicalism, political knowledge, and external efficacy substantively affect how voters see the main political parties in electoral disputes taking place in 52 countries from 1996 to 2019. Satisfaction with democracy, however, is context-dependent; it positively influences affective polarization only when generalized democratic satisfaction is low. Furthermore, I show that these correlations remain stable regardless of the operationalization of affective polarization—that is, based on two dominant parties and weighted for multiparty competition. These findings provide robust inputs to the study of party preferences and social distance in a cross-national longitudinal perspective.

MUSIC AS A POLITICAL VOICE: INTERRELATION BETWEEN NOTES AND THOUGHTS

Individuals are motivated to continue working by their belief in their own political effectiveness, which is especially true when the effects of protest actions are clearly linked to the acts that triggered them. This paradigm, on the other hand, has developed through time as a result of its emphasis on the human aspect while overlooking structural limits that limit the efficiency of the players in the situation. Because of this, the methodologies for measuring political success that is described in the next section show two separate but connected aspects: internal efficacy and external effectiveness, which are discussed in more detail below. When we talk about internal efficacy, we are referring to beliefs about one’s own ability to comprehend and participate successfully in politics, whereas when we talk about external efficacy, we are referring to beliefs about the responsiveness and competency of state authorities and institutions in responding to citizens demands.

Factors Affecting Korean Youth s Political Efficacy and Political Participation

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify factors that affect the political efficacy and participation of young Koreans. The sense of political efficacy is the confidence in an individual s political role and behavior, and is divided into internal and external efficacy as a predictor of political participation. Method: This study used the survey data of 3,530 people who participated in the 2019 Korean Youth Economic and Social Survey and the researcher analyzed the 25 variables related to political efficacy and political participation. Results: According to the results of the analysis, gender, educational background, income level, age, and occupation affected political efficacy, and the political efficacy significantly affected the political participation. Conclusion: The result suggests that we need to strengthen the political education and support for women and undereducated youth in order to increase their political efficacy.

The Effects of COVID-19 on External Political Efficacy

Significant scholarship examines the effects of disasters and disaster management on political behavior and attitudes. Yet, no research has assessed how health crises might shape people’s levels of external efficacy, nor how disaster response affects external efficacy beyond localized extreme-weather events. Using the United States as a case study, we seek to fill these gaps in the literature by exploring how individuals’ external political efficacy is affected by assessments of the federal COVID response. With an original collection of survey data from April 2020, we find that respondents who view the government’s handling of COVID more positively report higher levels of external efficacy. In a secondary analysis, we performed an experiment in February 2021 where people were given different narratives about government management of the pandemic response. The experimental results strongly suggest that disaster management—in this case the handling of the pandemic—shapes individuals’ efficacy.

Development and Application of the Placebo Response Model in Clinical Trials for Primary Sjögren's Syndrome.

This study aimed to develop a placebo response model for pharmaceutical clinical trials of primary Sjogren’s syndrome,and to quantitatively analyze the distribution and related factors influencing the placebo response to further optimize the design of clinical trials and evaluate the results of single-arm clinical trials. Public databases, including PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Library were searched for reports on randomized placebo-controlled trials for Sjögren’s syndrome which used the change from baseline in ESSDAI score as the primary outcome. The model-based meta-analysis method was used to evaluate the time course and the related influencing factors of the placebo response for ESSDAI in such clinical trials. A virtual placebo control group was constructed based on the final placebo response model to determine the treatment efficacy of belimumab and cyclosporine A for primary Sjögren’s syndrome in a single-arm study. A total of 12 studies involving 450 subjects were included in the analysis. The established model described the time-course characteristics of the changes in ESSDAI score from the baseline in the 48 weeks placebo group. We found that the onset time of placebo response was approximately 12 weeks, and its efficacy plateaued at 48 weeks. The baseline ESSDAI score had a significant effect on the maximum value of the placebo response; the maximum value of the placebo response decreased by 0.552 for every 1 score rise in the baseline ESSDAI score. The efficacy of belimumab and cyclosporine A in the single-arm trial was comparable to that of the placebo response at the same baseline; no significant therapeutic advantage was observed. The placebo response model established in this study could provide a basis for designing clinical trials for primary Sjogren’s syndrome in the future. It may also provide a reliable external efficacy control standard for single-arm clinical trials.

The impact of election outcome on internal political efficacy: The role of contextual factors

Many studies have investigated the consequences of election outcome for one of the important public attitudes, political efficacy. The effect of election outcome on external efficacy has been confirmed by most previous studies, whereas the effect on internal efficacy is not clear-cut. By reconceptualizing internal efficacy based on the social cognitive theory of self-efficacy, this study argues that there are two conditions for an election outcome’s impact on internal efficacy: the expected difficulty of winning and the level of involvement in the election. By analyzing panel survey data collected for three Japanese Lower House elections, this study shows that election outcome exerted an impact on internal efficacy if the following two conditions were simultaneously satisfied: (1) winners/losers perceived that the election was difficult/easy to win, and (2) voters were deeply involved in the election process.

When citizens met politicians – the process and outcomes of mixed deliberation according to participant status and gender

With deliberative democracy becoming increasingly incorporated into political processes, the instances of citizens and politicians meeting in deliberation, so-called mixed deliberations, is increasing too. While these are important steps towards more deliberative systems, the mixed deliberation setting nonetheless introduces certain risks regarding equality. Citizens and politicians have different deliberative capacities, which could affect the process of deliberation. Moreover, political inequalities such as gender gaps may be more evident in deliberations where politicians are present. This study focuses on a series of mixed deliberations in 2018 about a proposed municipal merger in Finland. Using content analysis of speech acts (N = 3404) as well as pre- and post-deliberation surveys (N = 225), we analyze patterns according to participant status (politician/citizen) and gender regarding dominance, deliberative discussion quality, and impact on internal and external efficacy. The findings show that politicians dominated the discussions and achieved a higher deliberative quality than citizens. The findings also revealed that women achieved higher deliberative quality in their speech acts.

Direct Democracy and Party Membership: Testing the Role of Political Efficacy

The declines in political party memberships along with an increase in direct democracy have drawn numerous scholarly discussions. Previous literature has explored the relationship between direct democracy and party membership, but the role of political efficacy in shaping this relationship has not been systematically examined. In particular, direct democracy can increase political efficacy by enhancing citizens’ civic skills and perceptions about government responsiveness and indirectly raise citizens’ interests in joining political parties. Using the structural equation model, this study shows that political efficacy strongly correlates with direct democracy and plays a significant role in influencing the effect of direct democracy on party membership. Moreover, results from the bootstrap mediation test of examining potential causal inferences suggest that there are distinct differences in the indirect effects of direct democracy mediated by internal efficacy and external efficacy on party membership.

Women learn while men talk?: revisiting gender differences in political engagement in online environments

ABSTRACT There is an inconclusive debate on whether male and female users of social media platforms engage with political content differently. While some highlight minimal differences, others evidence an engagement gap where male are more visible within online environments. Drawing on data from a representative survey of citizens in France, the UK and USA, we explore the engagement gap in more granular detail. Our data show minimal gender differences for most forms of online political engagement, but there remain some indications of a gendered divide. While the feeling of external efficacy is crucial to engage online regardless gender, women appear to need a sense of higher levels of competence in order to engage with online political content, especially for sharing and commenting. The study confirms interest in politics, extreme political ideological views and large social media network as prompt for more eager political engagement, but we do not find any substantial gender differentiation. Our findings suggest some minimal country differences on women engagement in commenting. Overall, our data indicate that while women may be as likely as men to participate in online political expression, through sharing and commenting, and may have an equal overall share of voice, the voices of many women are at least more muted in open public political discussions environment.

National Presidential Election Turnout: 1952 to 2020

In an era when elections scholars expected American national presidential election turnout to increase, its steep, prolonged post-1960 decline sparked deep concern and generated an avalanche of individual-level analyses searching for explanation. The post-1960 decline, however, no longer dominates turnout’s trajectory; it has been on the upswing since 1996. This complicates our understanding as we have yet to settle on turnout’s description, much less its explanation. Here we introduce the first political science-oriented, multivariate modeling of American national presidential election turnout. Our results offer a mix of important confirmatory and original findings. First, we discover that modeling turnout’s decline as a post-1968 secular disturbance reveals turnout’s expected steady increase across the modern era (1952–2020). Second, we show that turnout’s increase can be traced to increased polarization working its influence indirectly through the direct, positive turnout affects of voter external efficacy and negative presidential campaign advertising (1960–2012).

The Voting Decision: Social Media Use, Internal and External Efficacy Aspects

The Voting Decision: Social Media Use, Internal and External Efficacy Aspects

Public Perceptions of Women’s Inclusion and Feelings of Political Efficacy

Theoretical work argues that citizens gain important symbolic benefits when they are represented by gender-inclusive institutions. Despite the centrality of this claim in the literature, empirical evidence is mixed. In this article, I argue that these mixed findings are—in part—because many Americans hold beliefs about women’s inclusion that are out of step with reality. Leveraging variation in survey respondents’ beliefs about women’s representation, I examine how these perceptions influence attitudes toward Congress and state legislatures. In both cases, I find that believing women are included is associated with higher levels of external efficacy among both men and women. Using panel data, I then show that when citizens’ underestimations (overestimations) are corrected, their levels of efficacy increase (decrease), shedding further light on this relationship. The findings presented in this research add new theoretical insights into when, and how, Americans consider descriptive representation when evaluating the institutions that represent them.