Reichert Frank
Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Eur J Psychol. 2016 May 31;12(2):221-41. doi: 10.5964/ejop.v12i2.1095. eCollection 2016 May.
This study presents evidence for the mediation effect of political knowledge through political self-efficacy (i.e. internal political efficacy) in the prediction of political participation. It employs an action theoretic approach-by and large grounded on the Theory of Planned Behaviour-and uses data from the German Longitudinal Election Study to examine whether political knowledge has distinct direct effects on voting, conventional, and/or unconventional political participation. It argues that political knowledge raises internal political efficacy and thereby indirectly increases the chance that a citizen will participate in politics. The results of mediated multiple regression analyses yield evidence that political knowledge indeed translates into internal political efficacy, thus it affects political participation of various kinds indirectly. However, internal political efficacy and intentions to participate politically yield simultaneous direct effects only on conventional political participation. Sequentially mediated effects appear for voting and conventional political participation, with political knowledge being mediated by internal political efficacy and subsequently also by behavioural intentions. The mediation patterns for unconventional political participation are less clear though. The discussion accounts for restrictions of this study and points to questions for answer by future research.
本研究为政治知识通过政治自我效能感（即内在政治效能感）在预测政治参与方面的中介作用提供了证据。它采用了一种行动理论方法——大体上基于计划行为理论——并使用来自德国纵向选举研究的数据，以检验政治知识对投票、常规和/或非常规政治参与是否有不同的直接影响。研究认为，政治知识提高了内在政治效能感，从而间接增加了公民参与政治的可能性。中介多元回归分析的结果表明，政治知识确实转化为内在政治效能感，因此它间接影响各种形式的政治参与。然而，内在政治效能感和政治参与意图仅对常规政治参与产生同时的直接影响。投票和常规政治参与出现了顺序中介效应，政治知识由内在政治效能感中介，随后也由行为意图中介。不过，非常规政治参与的中介模式不太清晰。讨论部分阐述了本研究的局限性，并指出了未来研究有待解答的问题。
