Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

Regarding the Political Malaise of industrialized democracies, research studies on the last half of the XX century concentrated a great interest for discovering the reasons, elements and consequences of citizens’ participation and perceptions (e.g. Easton, 1975; Farah et al., 1979). The interest in public affairs, trust in institutions, political efficacy, cynicism and the negativism were beginning to become relevant variables regarding the analysis of the disaffection in the western democracies (Austin and Pinkleton, 1995; Marinus P. C. M. van Schendelen, 1981; Miller, 1980; O’Keefe, 1980; Pinkleton and Austin, 2002). However, some studies have agreed that the research of the last 40 years had been usually restricted to consolidated and industrialized systems (Prior, 2010; Torcal, 2006). This situation implies a new problem, because scholars have suggested that the development of the political attitudes depends on the social context, years of democracy and the economic development of the region (Farah et al., 1979; Madsen, 1978; Powell, 1986). For this reason, we understand that it would be necessary to extend the study of these variables in new democracies. Although there are some studies about political attitudes in this context (e.g. Cantillana Peña, Contreras Aguirre, Morales Quiroga, Oliva, & Perelló, 2017; Maldonado Hernández, 2013; Torcal, 2006; Torcal & Lago, 2006), they haven´t used the methodology proposed by the literature.

With this context, we seek to study the engagement phenomenon, analyzing the impact that political efficacy - i.e. external and internal – would have on non-electoral participation. In this way, we pretended to contrast the following hypotheses:
H1: Internal political efficacy would be related with more citizens’ participation in non-electoral political activities.
H2: External political efficacy would be related with more citizens’ participation in non-electoral political activities.

To contrast our hypotheses, we used a survey of our own design and applied by GFK-Adimark during the years 2016 and 2017. The survey was composed by 1650 face-to-face cases each year, including the 10 most populated cities of the Chilean Region of Valparaíso. With this data, and following the methodology proposed by the literature at the moment of operationalize political efficacy (Bollen et al., 2008; Morrell, 2003), we estimated different Structural Equation Models (SEM). The results do not suggest evidence to support the impact of external efficacy - system responsiveness - into non-electoral participation. In contrast, internal efficacy - self-competence - would influence these kinds of behaviors. These results allow us to extend the current evidence of consolidated systems to new democracies like Chile.
Considering the problems of distrust and the growing discontent in different Hispano-American countries (Barrientos and Añorve, 2014; Freidenberg and Aparicio, 2016; Freidenberg and Cisneros, 2016; Gamboa and Segovia, 2016; Montero et al., 2016), we think that these results would be an important element to understand how some attitudinal and behavioral aspects works in contexts of discomfort.