Efficacy, Mistrust, and Political Mobilization

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Abstract
Using data from the eight-nation Political Action opinion survey undertaken during the mid-1970s, this article tests the mistrustful-efficacious hypothesis outlined by William Gamson—the idea that a combination of high political efficacy and low political trust is the optimum combination for political mobilization. Several different versions of the hypothesis are tested and several different combinations of control variables are included in the analysis, but no matter how the hypothesis is tested, the results are consistently weak. The concluding discussion centers on the reasons for this poor performance and its implications.