Drivers of Political Violence in the United States

In the wake of the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump, expert and public attention has turned to the issue of political violence in the United States. Public opinion surveys show that more than one-third of Americans regard the use of political violence against the government or political opponents to be acceptable (Balz, Clement, and Guskin 2022), and there is evidence that public tolerance for political violence may be increasing (Diamond et al. 2020). Recent public opinion research also finds that a plurality of Americans is concerned about the specter of violent civil unrest in the United States (Orth 2022). Scholars who typically study civil wars in other countries have begun to examine whether the United States is on track to itself experience widespread domestic violent civil conflict (Walter 2022). In recent testimony before Congress, Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted that, according to polling, the current level of public acceptance of political violence in the United States is approaching that exhibited in Northern Ireland during the height of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in the early 1970s (Kleinfeld 2022).

What explains the volatile situation in which the United States presently finds itself? This commentary investigates four important drivers of political violence in the United States today: toxic political polarization, toxic identity-based ideologies, assaults on democratic norms, and disinformation and political conspiracies. Each of these contributes to violent political instability. I briefly explain each in turn and discuss some potential ways to address them.

Toxic Political Polarization

The United States is a politically divided country in which partisans increasingly loathe and mistrust one another. Around 80% of self-identified Republicans and Democrats report harboring strong negative feelings toward people associated with rival political parties (Pew 2017). Indeed, partisan loyalty itself is increasingly based on aversion toward out-partisans—members of rival parties—rather than attraction to one’s own party program or platform. Political scientists variously refer to this phenomenon as “affective political polarization,” “political sectarianism,” and “political tribalism” (Finkel et al. 2020) and observe that it has grown dramatically in the past 40 years (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012). According to Mason (2018), political polarization is particularly acute in the United States today because partisan political affiliations are now closely tied with peoples’ racial and religious identities. This reinforces a zero-sum, sectarian-tribal nature to political life.

A certain degree of polarization is a natural component of all democratic societies. However, political polarization in the United States has become toxic and dangerous. Scholars connect severe polarization to a host of negative outcomes including increased popularity of authoritarianism and demagogues (Crimston, Selvanathan, and Jetten 2021) and the weakening or breakdown of democratic rule (LeBas 2018). My own research finds that political polarization is also a driver of political violence. Using original survey data, I find that individuals who express high levels of affective polarization—strong affiliation with their own political party along with aversion or mistrust of people affiliated with the other political party—are more likely to regard the use of political violence to be acceptable (Piazza 2022b). I find this relationship for both highly partisan Republicans and Democrats.

My research also indicates that toxic polarization has consequences for actual political violence. In the aforementioned study (Piazza 2022b), I examined global data for 85 democratic countries for the period 1950 to 2018. Using two measures of severity of political and civil violence, I found that increased political polarization raised the probability by around 35% that a democracy experiences more widespread political violence. In other research, I also find that politically polarized countries in general—both democracies and nondemocracies—are prone to experience more domestic terrorism, which is a specific manifestation of political violence (Piazza 2020). This is because polarized societies provide fertile ground for terrorist actors to form, recruit members, and launch attacks with less danger of public backlash.

Toxic, Identity-Based Ideologies

In addition to becoming more polarized, the United States is currently in the thrall of extremist political ideologies that are tied to expressions of racial and religious identity and reflect the anxieties of a subsection of white Americans. Recent research has found that formerly fringe ideologies, such as Christian nationalism—the idea that America is intended to be a white, Christian nation and that the United States needs to be “taken back” for God—have moved into the mainstream of political discourse (see Whitehead and Perry 2020). Such formerly fringe ideologies are very potent and are easily manipulated by political entrepreneurs to demonize and dehumanize political opponents. Recent work by Armaly, Buckley, and Enders (2022) shows that individuals who subscribe to extremist ideologies like Christian nationalism are more likely to view political violence as acceptable. An important contributor to this process is fear of demographic change and loss of privilege for formerly dominant groups, like white Christians in the United States, who respond to perception of social decline by lashing out against minorities (see Walter 2022).

This troubling phenomenon is also evident in other countries. For example, in their study of subjects in Denmark and Norway, Obaidi et al. (2021) find evidence that fear among majority group members that they are losing their demographic, social, political, and cultural dominance in the face of increased immigration and ethnic diversity—a phenomenon that conspiracy-minded extremist ideologues call “replacement”—is associated with increased support for political violence. Using observational and experimental evidence, the authors find that white subjects are more prone to exhibit violent intentions, among other negative reactions, when they are led to believe that nonwhite, non-Christian immigrants to Scandinavia are growing in number and threaten the demographic and cultural supremacy of white Christians.

Assaults on Democratic Norms

Acceptance of liberal norms and practices, such as the willingness of losing politicians to abide by the outcome of free and fair elections, are essential for reinforcing nonviolent political behaviors within democracies (Anderson et al. 2005). When such norms and practices are broken by political elites, political violence and the public acceptance of political violence, increase. In a study of 105 democracies worldwide for the period 1970 to 2018, I find that approval for political violence and the actual occurrence of political violence, specifically domestic terrorism, increases after losing politicians refuse to accept election results in free and fair contests (Piazza 2021). This is because when losing politicians reject losses in free and fair democratic elections, they violate and weaken the democratic norms and institutions that constrain nonviolent behaviors and sharpen societal grievances and societal divisions, thereby making political violence more palatable and less likely to produce backlash.

In a separate study, I focus specifically on the impact of baseless allegations of election fraud on support for political violence within the United States. Using an experimental design, I find that when conservative individuals are led to believe by Republican politicians that Democrats cheat in elections, their antipathies toward racial and ethnic outgroups are triggered and they are more likely to advocate the use of political violence (Piazza 2022c). I do not find similar effects for liberal subjects exposed to allegations that Republicans cheat in elections. I argue that this is because liberals have not been similarly primed to respond to unsubstantiated allegations of GOP election fraud and have not been exposed to the same sorts of racialized rhetorical undertones that have been attached to allegations that Democrats cheat in elections.

Disinformation and Conspiracy Theories

Finally, the current U.S. informational ecosystem facilitates political violence. Social media provides a microphone to purveyors of “disinformation” (deliberately misleading information) and helps disseminate and popularize conspiracy theories. Political leaders seize on this to galvanize and mobilize supporters. Current research finds that both disinformation and conspiracy theories contribute to political violence.

In a recent study, I find that countries awash in disinformation see subsequent increases in domestic terrorist attacks (Piazza 2022a). I examined three sources of social media disinformation across more than 100 countries: disinformation propagated by domestic governments; disinformation propagated by domestic nongovernment actors and political parties; and disinformation propagated by foreign governments, exemplified by the Russian social media disinformation campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I find that all three disinformation sources significantly raise the likelihood that a country will experience domestic terrorism. This is because disinformation campaigns deepen preexisting social and political divisions in society, rendering terrorism more acceptable. Moreover, I find that foreign government disinformation campaigns are particularly divisive and therefore likely to increase domestic terrorism.

One possible reason that online disinformation campaigns drive political violence is because they fuel conspiracy theories that motivate individuals to engage in violent extremism. A case in point would be the popular conspiracy theory that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen, which prompted the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Researchers have also found that individuals who believe in conspiracy theories and exhibit “conspiratorial thinking” patterns are prone to express support or tolerance for the use of political violence (Armaly and Enders 2022; Vegetti and Littvay 2022).

Conclusion

So, what is to be done? These drivers are deeply imbedded in contemporary U.S. politics and will be difficult to uproot. However, toxic polarization, toxic identity-based ideologies, assaults on democratic norms and practices, and disinformation and conspiracies are not new; indeed, they have been long present in U.S. political life. What is new is that they have entered the political mainstream and are being used by politicians to garner attention, galvanize and mobilize supporters, attract donors and capture the attention of media viewers. What we may hope to achieve, then, is to mitigate their impact by moving them out the mainstream.

Several proposals for political and public policy reforms in the United States could help address political violence. For example, initiatives to reduce political gerrymandering, experiment with new election systems such as ranked-choice voting, and reform campaign finance may help usher in a more moderate and consensus-seeking politics and a brand of political leaders who will refrain from divisive and extreme political rhetoric and policy positions. As previously noted, media also contributes to drivers of political violence by highlighting extremist content or disseminating disinformation or conspiracy-oriented information. Reinstituting appropriate equal time rules for media companies, passing legislation that requires better policing of extremist or misleading online and social media content, and finding ways to reinvigorate local media that eschew national, polarizing, identity-based news reporting could address the problems in our media ecosystem. These types of reforms are not without their costs and controversies. However, they could be potentially leveraged to usher political violence, and its public acceptability, out of the mainstream and back into the margins of political life in the United States.