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What drives civic engagement in weak democracies? What are the psychological processes
responsible for overcoming post-authoritarian learned helplessness? This dissertation
argues that in non-Western political contexts, traditional psychological predictors
of individual engagement in civic affairs---openness to experience, high self-efficacy,
and low political skepticism---do not align with previously established Western patterns.
Building on the results of a large-scale field experiment on a demographically diverse
sample of 1,381 respondents, as well as multi-year ethnographic observation of community
engagement in Ukraine, this dissertation demonstrates that perceived self-efficacy
and collective efficacy improve respondents’ interest in civic engagement while suppressing
their interest in running for office.
In the first chapter, I explore what factors prompt citizens’ interest in joining
an electoral commission, supporting a recycling campaign, establishing a civic council,
and leading a homeowners’ association. Using original experimental data, I demonstrate
that individual empowerment constitutes a sufficient condition for civic engagement.
Moreover, contrary to most theoretical expectations, the effects of individual empowerment
on involvement in local civic activities are comparable to the effects produced by
civic education. This study represents one of the first experimental contributions
to support the theory of democratic learning and shows that citizens benefit from
democracy by practicing it and trying various civic activities rather than by learning
democratic values through civic education and top-down democracy promotion.
In the second chapter, I study the effects of personality traits on policy priorities
and ideological preferences of Ukrainians. Previous research suggests that personality
affects political attitudes by predisposing people to certain policies. Contrary to
these findings, this chapter shows that personality predicts individual response to
the revision of the status quo rather than preference for specific policies. I illustrate
this logic by addressing one of the most counterintuitive associations between personality
traits and political attitudes---the link between openness to experience and conservatism
in Eastern Europe. Combining the results of open-ended coding and bootstrapped regression
models, the analysis shows that openness to experience predicts both social liberalism
and social conservatism. I build upon these findings to address the existing gaps
in the personality theory of ideology by suggesting that those open to experience
are, on average, more responsive to any policy suggestion that revises the status
quo.
In the final chapter, I examine the problem of nascent political ambition in weak
democratic states. Building on the results of my original field experiment, I show
that higher efficacy discourages political engagement in Ukraine. Specifically, increasing
respondents’ collective efficacy, on average, disincentivizes them from running for
city parliament. Most surprisingly, citizens with higher pre-treatment levels of internal
political efficacy were the ones most dissuaded from running for office after the
induction of collective efficacy. Their improved sense of collective efficacy might
have discouraged them from political institutions that they consider powerless and
inefficient.
Altogether, these findings challenge existing wisdom in comparative political psychology
by demonstrating that (1) psychological pathways to collective action are more context-dependent
than previously assumed; (2) previously established effects of personality traits
and self-evaluations on political behavior do not travel well beyond Western European
and North American contexts; (3) self-efficacy and collective efficacy do not differ
in their causal effects on individual attitudes and behavior; and (4) politically
sophisticated individuals are put off from political office when reminded of alternative
non-political ways of achieving collective goals, with this running from office creating
a trap of declining political ambition in weak democracies. Thus, democratic promotion
campaigns that increase self-efficacy or collective efficacy might suppress nascent
political ambition when the population is skeptical of the quality of representative
democratic institutions.
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