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Political efficacy is a construct comprised of two dimensions. Internal political efficacy is the individual’s assessment of his or her own capacity to navigate a political system and external political efficacy is the individual’s judgment of the political system’s responsiveness. Although political efficacy has been associated with political activity (e.g., voting), consensus building, empowerment, and trust in government, few studies have developed measures of political efficacy for use outside of the field of political science. The current study makes three distinct contributions. The first paper begins with a review of the political science and political psychology literature specific to the development and application of the construct of political efficacy. It then integrates a review of social cognitive theory and positions political efficacy within that theoretical framework and contests that political efficacy would be a useful and revelatory tool in an education policy context. The second paper contains both a pilot study, which develops the measures of internal and external political efficacy, and a parent study. Following the measure development, survey research was conducted among a national sample of homeschool teaching parents. This study finds that that internal and external political efficacy are positively and significantly associated with basic needs satisfaction (a key construct in self-determination theory), the use of autonomy supporting instructional practice in individual home schools, and parent perceptions of student engagement. Finally, the third paper investigates individual and contextual predictors of internal and external political efficacy and hypothesizes that teacher collaboration, and organizational construct, predicts both. Data from a sample of traditional public and charter school teachers and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) allow decomposition of the variance in order to examine how the demographic and substantive independent variables are associated with internal and external political efficacy. The study finds that EPE varies significantly with school membership and is strongly predicted by teacher collaboration. The current study contains three distinct papers. The first paper begins with a review of the political science and political psychology literature specific to the development and application of the construct of political efficacy. It then integrates a review of social cognitive theory and positions political efficacy within that theoretical framework and contests that political efficacy would be a useful and revelatory tool in an education policy context. The second study investigates the relation between political efficacy beliefs and the instructional choices of homeschool teaching parents. The paper begins with a pilot study to develop valid and reliable measures of both internal and external political efficacy. In the parent study, over 2000 teaching parents participated in the study. A series of regression analyses were used to examine relation between political efficacy beliefs, needs satisfaction (for autonomy, relatedness, and competence), autonomy supporting instructional practices, and perceived student engagement. Competence, educational attainment, and oldest student’s grade were significantly and positively associated with internal political efficacy while oldest child’s grade and homeschooling likelihood were negatively associated with external political efficacy. Finally, a host of variables (including internal political efficacy) were positively and significantly associated with the use of autonomy supportive instructional practices. The final study used survey data from more than 700 traditional public and charter school teachers. This study hypothesized that collaborative school environments would be positively and significantly associated with individual levels of internal and external political efficacy. HLM (hierarchical linear modeling) was employed to partial the variance to within school and between-school components. Collaboration and internal political efficacy were positively and significantly associated with teacher external political efficacy (teacher experience was negatively related). External political efficacy and teacher experience were positively and significantly associated with internal political efficacy. |
