Pathways to Civic Engagement with Big Social Issues: An Integrated Approach

Individual actions designed to address issues of public concern is a common theme in the discourse on how to mobilize resources and target efforts toward sustainable practices. We contribute to this area by (1) developing and empirically validating a multidimensional scale for civic engagement; (2) synthesizing and testing the adequacy of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the value–belief–norm (VBN) theory in explaining civic engagement; and (3) considering how an individual’s orientation, identity, and beliefs motivate moral thinking and action. The focus is on the important social issues of global warming and climate change, income inequality, and world poverty, and hunger. We follow both correlational and configurational approaches to examine symmetric and asymmetric causal relationships, respectively. The findings from a sample of 819 US citizens reveal that the TPB and VBN theory can adequately explain civic engagement, after we control for the influence of past experience. In addition, while belief in a just world inhibits the occurrence of adverse consequences and the formation of positive attitudes, social value orientation, and moral identity facilitate them. Notably, at least two causal conditions need to be present for adverse confsequences to emerge, while moral identity is almost a necessary condition for the development of positive attitudes. We conclude with a discussion of important implications for researchers and practitioners.