Political Information Efficacy?

Sometimes you discover a familiar friend with a new name.  It happens all the time in social science, especially if you read across disciplines.  A political scientist might call a concept by one label, a psychologist by another, and a mass comm scholar, oh we'll come up with one of our own.

So when I read this study about political information efficacy, it was like finding an old friend.

Kaid and her colleagues in an American Behavioral Science article attack the question of low political participation among young adults by looking also at not only their political knowledge, but their confidence in their knowledge.   Or, as they write:

Our own research suggests that there is yet another reason for concern about low levels of political information and accurate knowledge among young citizens. We have found a strong relationship between young voters’ perceptions or confidence in their political knowledge and the likelihood that they will exercise their right to vote.

Political efficacy is traditionally broken into either external efficacy (beliefs in the government's responsiveness) and internal efficacy (one's own competence to handle the complexities of political discourse). "Our theory of political information efficacy," the authors write, "is closely related to internal efficacy but differs in that it focuses solely on the voter’s confidence in his or her own political knowledge and its sufficiency to engage the political process (to vote)." 

In other words, perceived knowledge. 

Find Note 4 in the study and you discover the items used to measure political information efficacy.  Oh hell, I'll save you the trouble.  They are, on a 5-point agree-disagree continuum:

•  I consider myself well qualified to participate in politics
• I think that I am better informed about politics and government than most people
• I feel that I have a pretty good understanding of the important political issues facing our country
• If a friend asked me about the presidential election, I feel I would have enough information to help my friend figure out who to vote for.
  

The internal consistency or reliability seems fine, with a reported Cronbach's Alpha of .87.  No surprise there.  They all measure the same thing -- Internal Efficacy.  But it sounds cooler if you come up with your own label and call it a theory; you get scholarly bonus points.  It's a helluva good study, but I'm just saying ...

So what did they find?  Ahhh, young grasshopper, that is a blog post for another day.  Stay tuned, because I'll talk not only about the findings but whether they mean anything today.

Forces Beyond Our Control?

Are our successes and failures driven by forces beyond our control?

There's great research into how we attribute our successes and failures. Basically when things go bad, we blame others. When things go bad for other people, we often attribute it to some personal failing on their part.

A new Pew Report I've been shamelessly mining for material includes this statement: Success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control. Respondents could agree or disagree. Pew asked this question five times since 1987 and the results paint an interesting portrait of what people think about the root causes of their own successes and failures. I've included the graph to the right for your enjoyment. The trend line suggests people are less likely to blame these mysterious "forces" as agreement with the statement has dropped from 38 percent in 1987 to 32 percent in 2009 (disagreement has, obviously, increased at the same time).

(This kinda taps a favorite construct of mine, locus of control, but also includes aspects of self efficacy or internal efficacy -- the label you use depends, in part, on the scholarly plot of land you call home, but there are nuanced differences beyond the scope of my blog. I'm not a nuance guy.)

The trend is actually quite hopeful. It suggests people are more willing to take credit for their successes and their failures, and perhaps some have moved beyond the X-File Mysterious Force explanation in their life. This isn't to suggest that forces beyond control do affect lives. Katrina is one. The economic meltdown is another. But it does suggest some increase in personal responsibility, and that's a hopeful sign.

Of course when things go wrong for me, it's always someone else's fault. Never mine.

Learned Helplessness and the News

People sometimes get a sense of powerlessness, of learned helplessness, from consuming the news. The issues seem so big. The actors seem so distant. And the journalistic routine of providing competing sides on an issue, or even competing solutions, can make things even worse.

If I were measuring learned helplessness or a sense of powerlessness or self efficacy right now, I'd tie it to the economic issues of the day. Dow drops. Dow climbs. Banks fail. Government acts, kinda. And it all seems so beyond the control of everyday people. TV is a factor. The "rendering of the story," according to one study, helps create learned helplessness in the viewers.

The good news? There's an election. Maybe ya heard about it.

If the news media can provide "mobilizing information" then people, theoretically, should learn more and as a consequence, act on that information. So a crisis timed with a presidential election is not necessarily a bad thing. We should see more participation, more political learning.

Okay, so that's the theory, but some of this is based on previous research. One study found that citizen apathy about topics in the news "results from a profound sense of powerlessness." Give "mobilizing information," they argue, and this provides a sense of self efficacy. People learn. People act. They feel more a part of the democratic process. A spiral of sorts is created, a good one, as they get a taste for being informed and involved.

But there is something in the nature of television news that helps promote learned helplessness, and yet there is something about really good candidates who can bridge this aspect of the medium by connecting, ironically through television, to tell people they really do matter. Whether this campaign, tied as it is to a financial crisis, results in more political knowledge is something many scholars will be asking. I can't wait to hear the answer.