Political science traditionally conceptualizes efficacy only in relation to politics and government. In this article, we look beyond political efficacy and examine the effect of general self-efficacy on young adults' voting behavior. General self-efficacy, an individual's estimation of capacity to operate successfully across a variety of domains, is often important to the behavioral decisions of individuals entering a new domain of activity. With data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, we examine the effect of general selfefficacy on voting behavior among young, first-time voters.We find that general self-efficacy has a positive effect on voter turnout, and this effect is strongest for young people from low socioeconomic-status families.
When federal lawmakers ended ''welfare as we knew it'' in 1996, state officials had to generate a host of new rules and regulations to govern the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Their efforts produced a collection of state TANF programs that differ today in a remarkable variety of ways. The new article by Gordon De Jong and colleagues aims to bring order to this complex policy landscape and to shed light on the decision-making dynamics that have created it. We second the authors' call for a systematic analysis of how TANF rules have varied across states and over time. We also share their desire to learn which TANF rules ''hang together'' in meaningful ways and whether these clusters suggest specific geographic, programmatic, or temporal patterns of development. Nevertheless, we disagree with how the authors pursue these goals and see good reasons to be skeptical of their conclusions.Our article focuses on De Jong et al.'s factor analysis of TANF rules. The policy dimensions generated by this analysis are the cornerstone of all that follows. They underlie the authors' findings on policy diffusion as well as welfare migration (De Jong, Graefe, and St. Pierre, 2005), and they are the products from this study that are most likely to find direct use in subsequent scholarship.Like any piece of empirical research, the article by De Jong et al. reflects a particular way of combining method, theory, and substantive knowledge. We believe the authors have negotiated this triad in an unbalanced way that privileges statistical priorities over other relevant concerns.Our intention is not to suggest that statistical considerations are insignificant, but rather to underscore that researchers confront tradeoffs in their efforts to balance theory, substance, and method. Rather than face up to n
This article outlines some of the literature on political mobilization and expands the field's research agenda beyond the typical canvassing activities. It describes the importance of political mobilization for both academics and political professionals. It then presents concerns about the study of mobilization, particularly the problems of endogeneity in observational studies and the use of field experiments. Finally, it turns the attention to the future of research on mobilization, arguing that more attention should be paid to how messages mobilize. The observations of political campaigns and the conversations with professionals who make their living doing election fieldwork strongly suggest that message matters. It is time to put politics and strategy back into the study of a political strategy, the article suggests.
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