Factors Influencing the Political Activity of Social Workers: A Comparative Study Among Swiss and United States Social Workers

Abstract

Various international and national social work ethical principles call social workers to participate in politics, yet not much research exists in the field of a political so-cial work. Little is known about the actual voluntary political engagement of social workers as well as factors influencing their political activity. Especially, few stud-ies with an international comparison focus have been conducted. Consequently, this study used cross sectional survey design to better understand the factors in-fluencing the political activity of social workers in Switzerland (n = 1242) and in the United States (n = 3033). The results indicate that the political activity of so-cial workers is strongly associated with the political influence of parents, with membership in a professional social work association as well as with political effi-cacy. There are some differences between Swiss and US social workers, mainly concerning the influence of memberships in trade unions. As one of few interna-tional practice comparison pieces, this article aims to further stimulate the dis-course on social workers’ political activity. For this purpose, implications for social work education, practice, and research are outlined in the final section.

The policy engagement of social workers: a research overview

“…In recent years, there are signs of more theoretically driven and systematic empirical efforts to identify the factors that explain SWs' policy engagement in the different policy routes (Gal and Weiss-Gal, 2015;Guidi, 2020;Kindler and Ostrander, 2022). The policy engagement conceptual framework (Gal and Weiss-Gal, 2023) provides a useful way to describe this volume of research and to present the factors that the research identified.…”

“…In particular, scholars have underscored the impact of civic or political skills, a psychological engagement with politics (self-efficacy to engage in politics or political interest) and membership in recruitment networks on policy engagement. This was the case for VPP (Ritter, 2008;Kindler and Ostrander, 2022), running for elected office (Lane and Humphreys, 2011;Greco, 2020;Amann and Kindler, 2022;Binder and Weiss-Gal, 2022), PP (Weiss- Gal and Gal, 2020) and a readiness of SWs to participate in the policy activities of SWPOs (Hoefer et al, 2019).…”