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、精英修辞和社会规范在激励行动中扮演了什么角色？对于那些对政治行为感兴趣的人来说，这些问题显然很重要；然而，除了对参与的研究外，很少有工作探索这些不同因素的影响。这个项目提供了一个框架，可以生成关于价值观、修辞和规范在塑造政治行为中的作用的假设。然后通过一项实验对这些行为进行测试，该实验侧重于一种特别重要的行为，即与能源消耗有关的行为。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是两种内部力量(价值观和态度)和两种外部力量(社会规范和精英修辞)的函数。其次，它将政治行为的研究范围扩展到具有公共后果的重要行动领域(即与环境有关的私人领域行动)。为了检验我的理论产生的假设，该实验评估了三组因变量的变化：(1)对个人能源消费的态度，(2)行为意图(例如，节能、对节能技术的资本投资)，以及(3)公开行为(即，参与者是否购买了标准灯泡或节能灯泡)。这项实验包括两个操作：(1)信息操纵--参与者阅读两个版本的报纸社论中的一个，无论是鼓励还是反对采取措施减少个人能源消耗；(2)规范操纵--一半的受访者接受亲行为的规范处理。除了加强我们对规范、价值观和信息如何相互作用以影响实际行为的理解外，这项研究还增加了对在一个特别重要的政策领域中驱动行为的因素的洞察。事实上，随着世界应对其持续不断的能源挑战，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.