Alternative Indicators for an Old Concept: The Cross-National Validity of Rival Measures of Political Efficacy

Political efficacy is often defined as the citizen’s belief that one can influence and understand government affairs and policies and that the government will respond to the citizen’s concerns. Attempts to measure levels of political efficacy are almost as old as the field of survey research and have generated much controversy. Xena’s (2014) analysis of questions designed to measure political efficacy that were placed on the European Social Survey in the early 2000s shows that traditional items have low to non-existent cross-cultural validity. In this presentation Xana and Scotto will discuss their joint work attempting a cross-national validation of an alternative political efficacy question battery first proposed by Niemi and his associates for use on the American National Election Study in the late 1980s. The cross-national validation of survey items whose level of analysis is ordinal is far from straightforward and the presentation is designed to identify challenges with the method and solicit feedback from the audience.