Efficacy and Voting

I blogged yesterday (or see below) about a study from American Behavioral Scientist that examines the role of efficacy and confidence of one's knowledge -- especially among young voters -- and voting.  In that post I broke down the methodology and touched on key concepts.  Today I sum up the results and ask about their meaningfulness in real-world politics.

Basically it goes like this: younger voters are less confident of their political knowledge, of their competence to vote.  This affects their likelihood to vote.  The results in this study are a bit slim, more tantalizing than conclusive.  And the role of media is unclear in this study.

But it makes sense that younger voters might be less confidence in their electoral competence.  They tend to consume less news and to not have built up a foundation of political knowledge from previous elections and campaigns.  That, along with other factors, suggests lower voting.

So what do we do?  Build up their confidence?

No.

We have enough of this self-esteem crap in schools, especially among kids who don't have all that much to be "esteemed" about.  If young people fill up on empty-calorie content such as The Daily Show without also consuming serious news, then they're likely to feel like they have a base of knowledge from which to vote but instead have little actual knowledge.  You might increase voting, but you might also increase "bad" voting.  I'm not sure how much a democracy gains, though I suppose indifferent or inconsistent voting beats no voting at all.

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.

Colbert, Take 2

"By attempting to mock conservative commentators, Colbert may unintentionally be helping these commentators sway potential voters to the right."

That's one of the conclusions to a study I discussed in detail yesterday. Published in the latest JOBEM, the research suggests that channel-surfing young people may not quite get what Stephen Colbert is up to as he plays a far-right, self-obsessed, TV talking head, or at least the effects of Colbert's comedy may have unintended consequences.

Watching Jon Stewart's faux news show? No such effect, suggesting something about playing an Archie Bunker-like role can have the opposite effect than you hoped for. Or maybe this is actually some kind of secret Colbert plot? A conservative, posing as a liberal, playing a conservative, and ... er, never mind. Getting a headache.

The mixed message is no doubt the root of the problem.

The authors hypothesized that Colbert's mixed message would lead to a decrease in internal efficacy, the idea that one is capable of participating in politics. The hypothesis makes sense. But Table 4 reports the results on "Internal Efficacy" and the standard question "Agree that politics and government seems too complicated." High scores mean low efficacy and there is a positive relationship between watching Colbert and this measure, meaning viewing it leads to less efficacy. But the authors say their hypothesis was not supported. It's confusing as hell, or I'm just confused. Clarification needed. They would have been better served by flipping the measure, recoding it in such a way that high meant greater internal efficacy, otherwise their table title is misleading.

Enough quibbles. It's a fascinating study, thus getting two days of discussion from me. Hell, might get a third if nothing better shows up.

Informed vs Feeling Informed

I've always been fascinated by the tension between being informed and feeling informed. In other words, lots of people think they're politically informed when, by most objective standards, they're not.

In psychology you'll find concepts like tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon or feeling of knowing. These are kinda cool but they don't really apply to political knowledge, except maybe in rare cases. They are often situations where you know an answer but can't quite dig it out of your brain and provide it (yeah, getting older here, see this more often).

Self efficacy or, from the political science folks, internal efficacy, do a better job of capturing what I mean. Broadly speaking, these have to do with a sense of competence. Do I feel adequate in keeping up with the complexities of public affairs and politics.

Most people say, yeah. But a lot don't.

Since 1948 there's been a slow, slight decline in how people answer whether politics is too complicated for them. About of third of U.S. voters now agree it's too complicated.

But I've never been happy with internal efficacy as a measure of perceived knowledge. Related concepts, but distinct. Or at least I think so. I've used internal efficacy in my own research as a surrogate of perceived knowledge, which to me is more particular, more specific, getting at an estimate of how much information one has about a candidate or campaign or the political world at large. Internal efficacy is broader, more about one's overall capacity to make sense of the world. I might have low perceived knowledge on something, but I could be damn confident in my efficacy at finding stuff out and becoming informed.

An Aside: yes, this is getting kinda PhDweebish and doesn't' have anything to do with McCain, Obama, or who they choose as vice presidents. Like everyone else I'm waiting to hear the news, though it almost never matters who the VP is in the long run.

OK, Hollander, but so what? If people feel informed, if they sense they are adequately informed, then they will be less likely to attend to the news, to the media, to new information. They're full. And certain media can create this sense of being full, kinda like empty calories from a soft drink, and not eat their veggies (i.e., news). That's the consequence: people will fill up on empty, funny, silly stuff and feel informed when, perhaps, they're not.