When do people take political action? What roles do values, elite rhetoric, and social norms play in motivating action? These questions are of obvious importance for those interested in political behavior; however, little work, other than research on participation, explores the impact of these various factors. This project offers a framework that generates hypotheses about the role of values, rhetoric, and norms in shaping political behavior. These are then tested with an experiment that focuses on a particularly important behavior, actions regarding the consumption of energy.
This project offers two primary contributions to scholars assessing the determinants of political behavior. First, it advances a more comprehensive framework to explain behavior as a function of two internal (values and attitudes) and two external (social norms and elite rhetoric) forces. Second, it extends the scope of research on political behavior to an important domain of actions with public consequences (i.e. private-sphere-environmentally-relevant actions).
To test the hypotheses generated by my theory, the experiment assesses variation in three sets of dependent variables: (1) attitudes about personal energy consumption, (2) behavioral intentions (e.g. energy conservation, capital investments in energy efficient technologies), and (3) overt behavior (i.e. whether the participant purchases a package of standard light bulbs or energy efficient light bulbs). The experiment contains two manipulations: (1) an information manipulation - participants read one of two versions of a newspaper editorial either promoting or discouraging taking steps to reduce personal energy consumption; and, (2) a norms manipulation- half of respondents receive a pro-behavior normative treatment.
In addition to enhancing our understanding of how norms, values, and information interact to affect actual behaviors, the study also add insight into what drives behavior in a particularly important policy domain. Indeed, as the world deals with its ongoing energy challenges, understanding citizens' actions is of the utmost importance.
