The Stability and Reliability of Political Efficacy: Using Path Analysis to Test Alternative Models

1Most observers agree about the general nature of political efficacy. It is a feeling that individual political action does have an impact upon the political process. See Angus Campbell, Gerald Gurin, and Warren Miller, The Voter Decides (Evanston, Illinois: Row, Peterson, 1954), p. 187. The authors of the American Voter used the concept to explain voting rates, but efficacy has been used since to try to explain a wide variety of kinds of political participation. Operationalizations have been diverse, but the four items developed by the Survey Research Center that are examined here are certainly the most widely used. See also Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren Miller and Donald Stokes, The American Voter (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964); Donald Matthews and James Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1966); Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Jeffery M. Paige, "Political Orientation and Riot Participation," American Sociological Review 36 (October, 1971), 810-820. For an extensive bibliography on political efficacy see David Easton and Jack Dennis, "The Child's Acquisition of Regime Norms: Political Efficacy," American Political Science Review, 61 (March, 1967), 25-3 8.