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Grounded in Media System Dependency theory, this work investigates the impact of new media on political efficacy. It suggests that dependence on online resources affects people’s perceptions about the democratic potential of the Internet. Using structural equation modeling, the study tests the relationship between political attitudes and the perceived utility of the Web. The analysis employs measures that take into consideration the facilitating role of communication technologies. Results indicate that online political efficacy is associated with individual views about the comprehensiveness and credibility of new media. Efficacy is also linked to the perceived ability of online tools to aid the maintenance of ideologically homogenous social networks. The intensity of Internet dependency relations is found to be predicted by the perceived comprehensiveness – but not credibility – of online news.

The authors propose a new motivation construct, political self-efficacy, and investigate how and when leader political mentoring influences follower political behavior and promotability through political self-efficacy.

The authors collected four samples to develop a scale for political self-efficacy and conducted two field studies of leader-follower dyads to examine the model.

Leader political mentoring enhances followers' political behavior and promotability through increasing their political self-efficacy. These positive indirect effects are stronger when followers have a higher positive political perception.

This study integrates mentoring research with organizational politics literature and theorizes how a domain-specific self-efficacy—political self-efficacy, translates the positive impact of leader political mentoring on constructive behavioral and career-related outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of trust, cynicism and efficacy on young peoples' (non)voting behaviour during the 2005 British general election.

Survey data were gathered from 1,134 interviewer‐administered questionnaires with young first‐time voters during the three‐week period following the British general election in May 2005. Validated attitudes statements were used to measure their levels of trust, cynicism and efficacy.

The research shows that young people are generally distrusting of and very cynical about politicians and the Prime Minister (Tony Blair) Thus, in part, the data support the existing evidence that cynicism contributes to feelings of political alienation. However, the paper's findings also indicate that while young people can be highly distrusting and cynical, they can also be interested in the election and vote.

Current, negative evaluations of young people and electoral politics need to be reviewed. While, it cannot be denied that this age group are highly cynical, and their electoral participation is in decline, for some, this cynicism, when combined with personal efficacy, can act as a positive force to stimulate “monitorial” interaction with election offerings. Consequently, further research is needed to understand young peoples' perceptions of democracy and electoral politics, how their personal efficacy can be increased and what feeds their cynicism.

This paper offers a contemporary understanding of young people as an interested and critical citizenry and raises a number of important questions that set a new agenda for political marketers researching youth electoral engagement in the future.

This study examines Pateman's “spillover thesis” that democratic participation in the workplace will “spill over” into political participation. It applies a latent class analysis (LCA) to identify patterns of political behavior and uses workplace participation and political efficacy as predicting variables of political behavior patterns.

This study analyzed the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) in 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) data. This study applied a LCA to identify distinct patterns in people's political behaviors and did a multinomial regression analysis to predict the patterns with workplace participation and political efficacy.

The study found partial support for the spillover thesis. Among three distinct political behavior patterns, two active patterns were associated with political efficacy. However, the mediation from workplace participation to political participation through political efficacy was not supported. Respondents involved in workplace units that collectively make work-related decisions were more likely to be active in political behaviors, but only one set of political activities. Higher political efficacy was found to lead to more active overall political participation of both patterns.

Unlike the previous studies of democratic spillover, which treated political behaviors either as independent types of behaviors or as a summative index of such binary coded variables, this study addressed such shortcomings of the previous studies by providing a more complex picture of political behavior patterns and their relationship with workplace participation. Future research can build on this unique methodological endeavor to explore a holistic picture of how workplace practices can influence politics and democracy through individual workers.

Firm performance has become a thriving research field. However, a review of previous studies shows that the answers to several fundamental questions remain vague and require further investigation. Thus, the purpose of this study is twofold. The first is to determine the extent of the involvement of political connections (PCs) in Pakistani-listed companies, and the second is to examine the association between PCs and firm financial performance with director efficacy’s moderating role.

A data set of 221 non-financial companies listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange for 10 years (2008–2017) was analysed using panel-corrected standard error regression. Additionally, the authors address endogeneity issue by using Hackman two-stage estimation and lagged variables regression.

The study found that PCs negatively affected the firm’s financial performance, and director efficacy as a moderator strengthened this relationship. The result is consistent with the political economy theory that argues that an unstable political system and a weak judicial system will strongly affect investors and their rights.

The impact of political influence on the corporate sector remains a concern for policymakers, regulators, investors, financial experts, auditors and academic researchers. This study’s findings are that an effective board of directors can strengthen the company’s best practices by controlling political connectedness to protect all the interested parties, particularly investors, and restore their confidence. Therefore, the results of this study can assist all stakeholders when a PCs exists to make the right decisions.

The study extends the literature in terms of theoretical contribution that uses an integrative approach to combine political economy theory, agency theory and resource dependence theory to address the moderating role of director efficacy with an association between PCs and firm financial performance. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no extant research has investigated the association between PCs and firm financial performance using five aspects of PCs, along with moderator director efficacy.

This study reviewed a body of empirical research on Carole Pateman's democratic spillover thesis, which argues that democratic participation in the workplace spill over into political participation. The review revealed significant variance in defining and measuring of workplace democracy and participation among quantitative empirical studies on the spillover thesis. The review also discovered that majority of the reviewed studies omitted higher level participation as a predictor, and political efficacy, which is a mediating mechanism between workplace participation and political behaviors, in testing the hypotheses. Suggestions for future research and limitations are discussed.

Theories and research on gender and civic engagement have changed dramatically since studies were conducted 50 years ago. Over time, definitions of political socialization, knowledge, and engagement have all evolved, and with these developments come differences in how we view male and female political and civic engagement.

Given the profound impact of social media on civic activism, as demonstrated by the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, the current study aimed to examine the factors that influence the public to engage in civic activism on social media platforms.

This study used the responses from 4,316 social media users who participated in the 2018 American Trends Survey (Wave 35) conducted by Pew Research Center. The dataset was analyzed using hierarchical regression.

The results suggest that respondents who were younger, female, White and liberal were more likely to participate in activism-related behaviors, such as using hashtags, changing profile pictures and participating in groups with shared interests in political and social issues. Respondents' engagement in online civic activism increased particularly when they had a strong motive for expressing and sharing their opinions. In contrast, external online political efficacy – the belief that social media influences policymaking and decision makers – was not significantly associated with activism engagement on social media.

This study identified key demographic characteristics of social media users who participate in online civic activism. In addition, the findings extend previous lines of inquiry by examining and assessing the impact of external online political efficacy and opinion expression motive. We conclude that individuals engage in civic activism on social media mainly because they find it important to express views on political and social issues and to find others who share these views, as opposed to thinking that social media can be used to exert influence on policy decisions.

Drawing on uncertainty management theory, the purpose of this paper is to propose that experiencing the authoritarian leadership (AL) will weaken followers’ self-efficacy, which induces their compulsory citizenship behaviors (CCBs), defined as workers’ unwilling prosocial behaviors in helping colleagues.

Survey/regression: data collected from Taiwanese workers supports the proposal.

The results not only support the proposal but also show that supervisor support will exacerbate the negative effect of AL with workers’ self-efficacy. Further, workers’ political skill will attenuate the above relationship.

This study complements scholarly knowledge about how AL, supervisor support, and political skill together influence workers’ self-efficacy, which then induces CCBs. The findings also remind supervisors not to offer support while at the same time demonstrating an AL style.

Social media platforms are increasingly used by activists to mobilize collective actions online and offline. Social media often provide visible information about group size through system-generated cues. This study is based on social cognitive theory and examines how visible group size on social media influences individuals' self-efficacy, collective efficacy and intentions to participate in a collective action among groups with no prior collaboration experiences.

A between-subject online experiment was conducted with a sample of 188 undergraduate participants in a large public university in the United States. Six versions of a Facebook event page with identical contents were created. The study manipulated the group size shown on the event page (control, 102, 302, 502, 702 and 902). Participants were randomly assigned to one of the six conditions and asked to read and assess an event page that calls for a collective action. Then their collective efficacy, self-efficacy and intentions to participate were measured.

The results showed that the system-aggregated group size was not significantly associated with perceived collective efficacy, but there was a curvilinear relationship between the group size and perceived self-efficacy. Self-efficacy partially mediated the relationship between group size and intentions to participate; collective efficacy did not.

The study contributes to social movement theories by moving beyond personal grievance and identity theories to examine how individuals' efficacy beliefs can be affected by the cues that are afforded by social media platforms. The study shows that individuals use system-generated cues about the group size for assessing the perceived self-efficacy and collective efficacy in a group with no prior affiliations. Group size also influenced individual decisions to participate in collective actions through self-efficacy and collective efficacy.