Survey data show that up to 44% of the public support politically motivated violence; but estimates of support for partisan violence are too large; large majority support charging suspects who commit acts of political violence

Westwood, Sean, Justin Grimmer, Matthew Tyler, and Clayton M. Nall. 2021. “Political Violence.” OSF Preprints. September 14. doi:10.31219/osf.io/a8m3n

Abstract: Political scientists, pundits, and citizens worry that America is entering a new period of violent partisan conflict. Provocative survey data show that up to 44% of the public support politically motivated violence in hypothetical scenarios. Yet, despite media attention, political violence is rare, amounting to a little more than 1% of violent hate crimes in the United States. We reconcile these seemingly conflicting facts with three large survey experiments (N=3,041), demonstrating that self-reported attitudes on political violence are biased upwards because of disengaged respondents, differing interpretations about questions relating to political violence, and personal dispositions towards violence that are unrelated to politics. Our estimates show that, depending on how the question is asked, existing estimates of support for partisan violence are 30-900% too large, and nearly all respondents support charging suspects who commit acts of political violence with a criminal offenses. These findings suggest that although recent acts of political violence dominate the news, they do not portend a new era of violent conflict.