A translation and validation of the Perceived Political Self-Efficacy (P-PSE) Scale for the use in German samples

Abstract

Caprara et al. (European Journal of Social Psychology 39:1002–1020, 2009) criticized existing measures of internal political efficacy for not taking into account psychological theories of self-efficacy and for the resulting low construct validity. As an alternative, they presented a ten-item measure called Perceived Political Self-Efficacy (P-PSE) Scale. Based on social cognitive theory, it adopts a psychological understanding of self-efficacy and captures the phenomenon in a more systematic and complete manner than previous measures of internal efficacy. We translated the P-PSE scale to German and tested it in a German national quota sample, using quotas for age, gender and education (N = 1025). We provided evidence on the scale’s construct validity (by testing its correlations towards related constructs) and on its criterion validity (by regressing political participation propensity on the P-PSE score). The scale explained ΔR2 = 26% of people’s propensity for political participation over and above sociodemographic variables, and ΔR2 = 12% over and above previously existing measures, demonstrating its incremental value. We also tested cross-cultural measurement invariance towards an Italian sample, establishing configural, as well as partial metric and scalar invariance. In addition, we validated a four-item short version of the scale, which proved to be similarly valid as the full version. We argue, that these two measurement instruments provide a more adequate way of assessing internal political efficacy for research in German-speaking countries.