Article Summary
Introduction
In 2021, the U.S. saw prominent examples of political violence, including the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol and an effort to kidnap the Governor of Michigan. Alongside these instances of violence has been high and rising affective polarization, or dislike of opposing partisans. While previous research identifies numerous harmful consequences of affective polarization, this work directly probes whether affective polarization causes increased acceptance of political violence. Specifically, they test whether activating various partisan social identities affects support for political violence.
Analytical Approach
A sample of Republican and Democratic respondents was recruited from Lucid. They completed demographics and “Dark Triad” personality measures (the Dark Triad scale captures a variety of malevolent traits such as narcissism and Machiavellianism), then proceeded to the experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions (see table), each primed unobtrusively by the completion of a set of questions.
| Control | No priming |
|---|---|
| Positive partisanship | Positive Partisan Identity Scale, assessing affinity to in-party |
| Negative partisanship | Negative Partisan Identity Scale, assessing hostility to out-party |
| American Identity | American Identity scale, assessing affinity to American identity |
Finally, participants completed two sets of questions gauging support for political violence. Set one asks whether it is justified for people to use violence to pursue their political goals, whether politicians deserve to be harassed or threatened, and whether members of the out-party “just deserve to be slapped.” Set two asks four questions about the acceptability of in-partisan violence against out-partisans (e.g. whether it is ever justified for an in-party member to send threatening messages to an out-party leader.”)
Main Findings
Support for violence was low overall, and there was no evidence that the experimental manipulations the authors employed shifted acceptance of political violence. None of the priming scales (positive partisanship, negative partisanship, or American identity) shifted support for violence, relative to the control or to each other. However, correlational analyses found that people who identify more strongly with their party express more support for political violence, as do people who are higher in Dark Triad traits.
Implications
There was no evidence in this paper that priming in-party affiliation, out-party hostility, or common American identity shifted support for political violence. This attempt to directly measure a causal effect of identity could fill an important gap in the existing literature, though it is unclear from the present study if any partisan identities were manipulated.
Questions left unanswered
Though the method of using unobtrusive questions is well-validated, it is important to also measure whether those questionnaires shifted identification in the predicted directions. Specifically, in this case, it would be important to measure both identification with the in-party and hostility toward the out-party among participants after the manipulation. Without that, it is impossible to say whether the null effects on support for violence occurred because partisanship does not affect support for violence, or because the manipulations employed here did not affect partisanship.
Methods and Analysis
Was the study and its analyses pre-registered?: Yes
Did the study rely on proxy variables to measure polarization?: No
Were standard p-value thresholds used (p<.05 or 95% Confidence Intervals that don’t overlap zero)?: Yes
- Largest p-value presented as significant: 0.05
Were correlational results interpreted with causal language?: No
Limitations / Weaknesses
The main limitation of this study is the aforementioned lack of questions assessing the impact of the experimental manipulations on participant identities. Though the authors explain that they did not want to make the manipulation obvious by asking about the target identities, they could have included these questions after the questions about political violence.
Open Data & Analyses
Does the article make the replication data publicly available?: No
Does the article make the replication analysis scripts publicly available?: No
Article Citation
Kacholia, S., & Neuner, F. G. (2022). Priming Partisan Identities and Support for Political Violence. Frontiers in Political Science, 4, 835032.
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@article{kacholia2022priming,
title={Priming Partisan Identities and Support for Political Violence},
author={Kacholia, Suhan and Neuner, Fabian Guy},
journal={Frontiers in Political Science},
volume={4},
pages={835032},
year={2022},
publisher={Frontiers Media SA}
}