The Social Rewards of Engagement: Appealing to Social Motivations to Stimulate Political Interest at High and Low Levels of External Efficacy
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321715619431 |
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| Author | Joshua Robison |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(1) 24 –41
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321715619431
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The Social Rewards of
Engagement: Appealing to
Social Motivations to Stimulate
Political Interest at High and
Low Levels of External Efficacy
Joshua Robison
Abstract
Political interest is a crucial precursor to political engagement, but little is known about how to
stimulate greater interest. The article explores the role social motives have in generating interest.
A laboratory experiment is used in which it is possible to manipulate beliefs about the social
rewards of political engagement as well as external efficacy beliefs. Across two types of measures
for political interest (self-reports and revealed preferences), connecting political engagement
with social rewards led to substantial increases in political interest. Moreover, these effects were
particularly strong among individuals with low levels of external efficacy. Ultimately, the data
provide clear evidence that political interest can be positively stimulated with social rewards
mobilisation techniques and that it is rooted in beliefs about the potential motives pursuable
through politics. The paper concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of these
results for studies of political participation and mobilisation efforts.
Keywords
political interest, social pressure, political participation, efficacy, mobilisation
Accepted: 13 October 2015
Nearly all conceptions of democracy centre on the participation and preferences of citi-
zens (e.g. Dahl, 1971; Schattschneider, 1960). The importance of participation for both
normative and empirical accounts of democratic functioning has inspired numerous
explorations concerning the origins of citizen engagement (Campbell, 2006; Campbell
et al., 1960; Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993; Verba et al., 1995; Zukin et al., 2006). This
Aarhus University, Denmark
Corresponding author:
Joshua Robison, Department of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University, Bartholins Alle 7,
8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
Email: jrobison@ps.au.dk
619431PSX0010.1177/0032321715619431Political StudiesRobison
research-article2016
Article
Robison 25
research highlights the role played both by contextual factors such as mobilisation cam-
paigns (Gerber and Green, 2000; Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993) and dispositional fac-
tors such as skills and resources (Verba et al., 1995). The focus in this study is one of the
most important dispositional factors identified by prior research: political interest.
Interested citizens are substantially more likely than their disinterested peers to possess
knowledge about politics, vote in elections, and perform a wide variety of other political
behaviours (Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996; Milbrath and Goel, 1977; Verba et al., 1995;
Zukin et al., 2006). While situational factors play an important role in augmenting the
probability with which such outcomes occur, interest plays a critical role in affecting a
person’s baseline likelihood of engaging with politics. For this reason, understanding the
origins of political interest is a critical task for political scientists concerned with explain-
ing citizen engagement.
Political interest has long played a key role in explaining citizen engagement, which
raises the interconnected questions of why citizens differ in their interest levels and how
greater interest could be stimulated. However, as Markus Prior (2010) notes, political
scientists ‘do not understand where political interest comes from and could thus not rec-
ommend how to increase it’ (p. 747). I will argue that political interest is a judgement
concerning the likely outcomes of engagement with politics, with interest developing in
a positive direction when individuals connect engagement with valued goals. In demon-
strating the validity of this proposition, I take a page from recent work concerning social
motivations and voting (Gerber et al., 2008, 2010; Panagopoulos, 2010, 2013b; Sinclair,
2012). In particular, I argue that interventions that lead individuals to believe that political
engagement is useful for generating and maintaining social relationships will lead indi-
viduals to subsequently report greater political interest. Such interventions, in other
words, not only directly affect the probability with which a person votes, for instance, but
may also make it more likely that they will come to internalise a motivation to do so in
the future. I provide evidence consistent with this argument using data from a laboratory
experiment in which beliefs about the social rewards of political engagement were manip-
ulated. The results thus shed light on an important, but not fully understood, concept in
the political behaviour literature.
A second contribution of the present study concerns a potential moderating influ-
ence: external efficacy. Much of the work on social motivations and engagement has
used field experiments where explorations of potential moderating influences are diffi-
cult to carry out. Here, it is possible to manipulate external efficacy beliefs experimen-
tally, in both a positive and negative direction, alongside beliefs about the social benefits
of engagement. Importantly, I show that connecting political engagement to social
rewards appears to be particularly effective at stimulating interest among individuals
with low levels of external efficacy while appearing to have little additive effect for
those with high levels of efficacy. This suggests that connecting politics with social
rewards may not only stimulate greater engagement but also mitigate existing inequi-
ties in participation.
The paper proceeds as follows. First, it provides a definition of political interest and
builds the argument that connecting engagement with the satisfaction of valued goals,
and social motives in particular, should stimulate greater political interest. It then dis-
cusses how such interventions may work across varying levels of external efficacy. I then
proceed to describe the study and present the analyses before concluding with a discus-
sion of both the implications and limitations of the present study for understanding political
interest and behaviour.
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