“People like me” – Introducing Group-Related Political Efficacy

Political efficacy is a powerful predictor of political participation. Many traditional measures of efficacy in political science prompt survey respondent to think of “people like me”, thus evoking a group reference. However, without specifying which of multiple possible group memberships respondents ought to think of, answers may refer to completely different groups across respondents, resulting in imprecise measures. In this paper, we argue that political efficacy encompasses not only an internal and an external dimension, but that there also is a third dimension, group-related political efficacy, which reflects variation in degrees of political responsiveness to different groups. To empirically assess our argument, we developed new measures of political efficacy and conducted two large, register-based surveys among different age groups (adolescents and adults) in Germany. The results show that individuals have very different perceptions of group-related political efficacy depending on their educational, economic, and migration backgrounds. With around 30 percent, a significant share of respondents has opposing group-related and external efficacy, suggesting that theoretically and empirically differentiating between these dimensions is important. Based on our evidence, we conclude that a vague stimulus as “people like me” blur the differences between general external and group-related dimensions of political efficacy. Instead, to adequately assess political efficacy, we suggest to use our newly developed (short) scales, specifying the concrete group of reference that the researcher is interested in.