Political Self-Efficacy, Citizenship Competences and Empowerment

This chapter focuses on the concept of political self-efficacy. First, it describes what political self-efficacy is and how a deficit in this domain may be related to radicalization. The chapter describes how individuals perceiving a lack of acceptable effective means of addressing their collective grievances can justify violence as a valid mean. These perceptions are to a large degree synonymous to an insufficient political self-efficacy and are often coinciding with limited knowledge. The authors also describe empirical evidence for these relations. Then, educational interventions aimed at increasing political self-efficacy and thereby preventing radicalization are discussed, as well as empirical evidence for their effectiveness.