A PANEL MODEL FOR POLITICAL EFFICACY AND RESPONSIVENESS - AN APPLICATION OF LISREL-7 WITH WEIGHTED LEAST-SQUARES

Political efficacy is considered to be one of the most important attitudes in theories of political participation and democratic politics. It has been assumed that political efficacy is a stable, persistent orientation rather than a transient attitude. Several studies have examined the stability of political efficacy over time. In most of these studies, based on the analysis of the traditional SRC items, the stability assumption has been questioned. In this paper, we reconsider the stability issue but we adopt a different approach. We distinguish between two components of political efficacy: internal efficacy, a personal attribute and responsiveness, a system attribute, and we study their stability over time. To study the stability of political efficacy and responsiveness over time, we analyse the data with PRELIS and we develop a panel model using LISREL 7. As the observed variables are only ordinal, the estimation of the parameters of the model is based on polychoric correlations and on the weighted least squares method. Our analysis makes use of the Political Action Survey panel data for the USA. This data contains the six SRC efficacy items measured at two occasions. We find that the stability coefficients are higher than those reported in previous research. The difference in the values of the stability coefficients for each component seems to indicate that the personal component is more stable than the system component. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers.