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Making a Difference: Political Efficacy and Policy Preference Construction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2012

Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan  and
Eran Halperin
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Abstract

How does individual political efficacy affect the construction of policy preferences? This article presents a model of individual-level politicization of policy preference, which draws on psychological and political explanations and posits that greater external political efficacy results in a stronger effect of political ideology on concrete policy preference. Two empirical studies that test this hypothesis are reported: an original survey experiment conducted in Israel, and an analysis that relies on the 2002 wave of the European Social Survey. The empirical findings support the hypothesis. In contrast to the established conviction that no association exists between political efficacy and policy preferences, these findings reveal that external political efficacy has a polarizing effect on expressed policy preferences.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , April 2013 , pp. 295 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (email: [email protected]); and Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center (email: [email protected]), respectively. The authors wish to thank Bethany Albertson, Andrea L. Campbell, Daphna Canetti, Orit Kedar, Micha Mandel, Dan Miodownik, Lilach Nir, Tamir Sheafer, Gadi Wolfsfeld, the editors of the British Journal of Political Science, three anonymous reviewers, and participants of seminars at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and the Midwest Political Science Association Conference (2010), for valuable comments and suggestions. Appendix 2 can be viewed at 〈http://www.journals.cambridge.org/jps〉.

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47 It is possible that the treatment of political efficacy resulted in different levels of effort on the part of respondents to provide accurately true responses, and that this, rather than ideological polarization, accounts for the reported finding. The results of two analyses are sufficient to alley this concern. First, as noted above, the proportion of respondents who passed the IMC is not significantly related to the experimental groups (p = 0.538); Secondly, a variance comparison test between the ‘Low’ and ‘High’ political efficacy groups shows no significant difference in the variance between the two groups for the policy preference answers: ‘low-efficacy group’ SD = 0.3043; ‘high-efficacy group’ SD = 0.3047; p = 0.988; Moreover, neither were any significant differences in variance found in separate analyses for left-wing and right-wing supporters (p = 0.525 and p = 0.683, respectively).

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69 The analysis controls for the sophistication effect (education level as proxy), education level, gender, age, whether the country is traditional, former communist, logged disproportionality of parliament seats and votes, coalition size, and country fixed effects.

70 0.124 log odds; 30.5 per cent change in the ordinal level of policy preference of on SD change in ideology; p < 0.001.

71 A further set of analyses including both external and internal efficacy, their respective interactions with ideology while controlling for the sophistication (education) interaction, and the set of individual and macro controls for the four groups of policies yielded similar substantive results.

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74 These were conducted by creating new groups by merging right-wing and left-wing identifiers from different experimental groups, and calculating these groups proportion of support for the release bargain. For example, the top-right cell of Table 9 was calculated by taking the left-wing identifiers from the high-PE group and the right-wing identifiers from the low-PE group (n = 160), and calculating their overall proportion of support for the deal. Such groups provide four different distributions of political efficacy, across ideological groups: two uniform distributions (top-left and bottom-right), and two with uneven distribution (top-right and bottom-left).

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79 Wollman and Strouder, ‘Believed Efficacy and Political Activity’.