With resident empowerment widely recognized as a prerequisite for sustainable tourism development, this study tested how residents’ perceived knowledge of tourism affects their perceptions of psychological, social, and political empowerment through tourism, and how these, in turn, lead to their political action regarding tourism using Rocha’s ( 1997 Rocha, E. M. (1997). A ladder of empowerment. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17(1), 31–44. doi:10.1177/0739456X9701700104 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] ) theory of empowerment. Rocha ( 1997 Rocha, E. M. (1997). A ladder of empowerment. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17(1), 31–44. doi:10.1177/0739456X9701700104 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] ) conceptualized empowerment as beginning at the individual level and eventually welling up into the community level, with political action being the ultimate outcome of community empowerment. To test the hypothesized relationships, data were collected from residents of a booming wine tourism destination (i.e. Fredericksburg, Texas, USA) and analyzed via structural equation modeling. Results indicated that perceived knowledge had positive impacts on perceived psychological, social, and political empowerment, but only social and political empowerment were likely to generate political action. The positive influence of tourism knowledge on political action was partially mediated by social and political empowerment. The findings align with the Rocha’s ( 1997 Rocha, E. M. (1997). A ladder of empowerment. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17(1), 31–44. doi:10.1177/0739456X9701700104 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] ) theory and suggest empowerment starts at the individual level and moves up to collective empowerment. The findings also underscore the link between knowledge and empowerment, with perceived knowledge of tourism being an important precursor to a sense of resident empowerment and political action regarding tourism.

Although tourists’ affective bonds with one another are essential to their travel experiences as well as their pretrip anticipations, it nevertheless remains as an underexplored topic in tourism research. Responding to this research gap, this study modified the Emotional Solidarity Scale (ESS), which is originally intended to measure affective bonds between tourists and residents and developed new scales for its theoretical antecedents (i.e., shared beliefs, shared behaviors, and propensity to interact), using potential faith-based tourists in the United States as the target population. For scale modification and development, both qualitative and quantitative research methods were used. The modified ESS (resulting in two unique factors—communality and fairness) along with the new scales for its antecedents demonstrated strong psychometric properties. Further studies are suggested to confirm the two-dimensional structure of the modified ESS and the relationships between the three antecedents in tourists’ intragroup relationship settings.