Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: A Light Bulb Goes On: Values, Attitudes, Social Norms, and Personal Energy Consumption

人们什么时候采取政治行动？ 价值观、精英言论和社会规范在激励行动中扮演什么角色？ 这些问题对于那些对政治行为感兴趣的人来说显然很重要;然而，除了对参与的研究之外，很少有工作探讨这些不同因素的影响。 该项目提供了一个框架，产生关于价值观，修辞和规范在塑造政治行为中的作用的假设。 然后用一个实验来测试这些行为，这个实验关注一个特别重要的行为，即关于能量消耗的行为。 这个项目为学者评估政治行为的决定因素提供了两个主要贡献。 首先，它提出了一个更全面的框架来解释行为作为两个内部（价值观和态度）和两个外部（社会规范和精英修辞）力量的函数。 第二，它将政治行为的研究范围扩展到具有公共后果的行动（即私人领域的环境相关行动）的重要领域。 为了验证我的理论所产生的假设，实验评估了三组因变量的变化：（1）对个人能源消耗的态度，（2）行为意图（例如节能，节能技术的资本投资），以及（3）公开行为（即参与者是否购买标准灯泡或节能灯泡）。 实验包含两个操作：（1）信息操作-参与者阅读两个版本的报纸社论之一，要么促进或劝阻采取措施减少个人能源消耗;（2）规范操作-一半的受访者接受亲行为规范治疗。 除了增强我们对规范，价值观和信息如何相互作用以影响实际行为的理解外，这项研究还深入了解了在一个特别重要的政策领域中是什么驱动了行为。事实上，在世界应对其持续的能源挑战之际，了解公民的行动至关重要。

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.