The puzzle of low voter turnout: On the association between Swedish special educators’ self-efficacy for inclusive education and attitudes toward encouraging pupils with intellectual disability to vote

The voter turnout among citizens with intellectual disability (ID) is alarmingly low. This raises the question of why people with ID do not show up to vote. The overall aim of this study was to describe the role of self-efficacy for inclusive education as a predictor of special educators’ attitudes towards encouraging voting behaviour among pupils with ID. Consequently, our research question was the following: To what extent does self-efficacy for inclusive education predict Swedish special educators’ attitudes towards voting encouragement among pupils with ID? We studied 148 special educators from northern and western Sweden by using a non-random sample survey. In addition, we used an exploratory factor analysis and fit an ordinal logistic regression. We argue that the relative strength of civic education and, more precisely, attitudes towards encouraging voter behaviour are positively associated with teachers’ self-efficacy as special educators. Special educators who feel that they have mastered dealing with special-education tasks contribute to increasing the propensity of positive attitudes towards encouraging voting behaviour. Our study is – to our knowledge – the first to address the association between efficacy and voting encouragement among pupils with ID.