Self-efficacy is a central precursor of political ambition, yet efficacy-centered interventions designed to encourage capable citizens to run for office often produce mixed, null, or even counterproductive effects. This study argues that the effects of efficacy prompts depend on recipients’ motivational depletion. Using original data from a four-arm randomized lab-in-the-field experiment in Ukraine (N = 1,381), this paper examines whether pre-treatment demotivation moderates the effects of self-, collective-, and combined efficacy prompts on willingness to run for office.
The results indicate that efficacy-based encouragement becomes less effective as baseline demotivation rises, with the strongest attenuation appearing under the combined efficacy prompt: a one-standard-deviation increase in baseline demotivation was associated with an approximately 0.2-standard-deviation reduction in the treatment effect on the office-seeking index. In descriptive decompositions, this pattern appears most clearly for low perceived personal potential, negative future expectations, and more demanding political offices. The findings are consistent with a psychological boundary condition on efficacy-based interventions: when citizens lack a minimal sense of unrealized capacity and future attainability, efficacy-boosting messages may be processed not as resources but as demands.
Efficacy-oriented policies and democratic education programs may thus have a limited effect on motivationally depleted populations. Part of this work has been supported by the Columbia Global Policy Initiative and Columbia University’s Department of Political Science. Division of Social Sciences, Duke Kunshan University, Duke Avenue 8, Kunshan, 215316, China The authors declare no competing interests.
The IRB Committee of Columbia University approved the experiment on May 31, 2018 (AAAR8352). All manipulations were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. Informed written consent was obtained from all participants.
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
