Premium
Student Political Campaigners: Who Campaigns and What Effect Does It Have on Them?
Author(s) -
Zanna Mark P.,
Darley John M.,
Chaikin Alan,
Shafto Michael
Publication year - 1973
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1973.tb02404.x
Subject(s) - pessimism , biology and political orientation , politics , psychology , social psychology , scale (ratio) , political efficacy , political activism , attitude change , political science , law , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , epistemology
What characterizes students who become involved in political campaigns and what effects does their campaigning have on them? During a 2‐week election recess, about one‐third of the students at Princeton University chose to campaign. Those students who did so were liberal rather than radical in their political orientation. Those who participated seemed predisposed to campaign because they thought campaigning was an effective way of bringing about the changes that they sought. Campaigners were more likely than their fellow students to have engaged in political activity before. Such efforts may be evidence of their beliefs that political activity causes change, or might have been the forming experience for those beliefs. If the candidate for whom the student campaigned won the election, the student by and large strengthened or maintained his original attitudes about the efficacy of campaigning. If his candidate lost, the student became more pessimistic about the efficacy of campaigners whose candidates won also changed in an internal direction on a personal‐control subscale of Rotter's (1966) internal‐external scale; those whose candidates lost tended to change in an external direction.