Does Violence Breed Radicalization? Evidence from US Twitter after Capitol Riots

• In Event: Political Violence in Democracies

Abstract

Does experience of violence drive radical political engagement? We examine how the Capitol insurrection shaped the radicalization of US politics, looking at its short-term effects from the demand and supply sides. First, we analyze tweets posted by 116 Democratic and Republican politicians, identifying inflammatory content. Second, we analyze engagement with these tweets to measure public support for inflammatory political rhetoric. Estimating a series of difference-in-differences models, we find no changes in the number of inflammatory tweets that Democratic and Republican politicians posted following the Capitol event. However, we find that the Capitol attack lowered engagement returns to inflammatory messaging of Democratic politicians. These results are robust to different measures of inflammatory content and numerous falsification and permutation tests. Overall, the unexpected escalation of political violence in a mature democracy did not contribute to the radicalization of politics, lowering its appeal to voters on the one side of polarized political spectrum.

Authors

• Krzysztof Krakowski, King’s College London

• Juan S. Morales, Wilfrid Laurier University