Mobilization for Political Violence in the United States of America

• In Event: Historical Legacies of Violence in Democracies

Abstract

Amidst growing concerns regarding mobilization for political violence in the U.S., scholars of civil conflict have focused on developing predictive models to identify when and where political violence is likely to emerge (Walter 2022). Particularly puzzling is the unprecedented scale of the January 6th Capitol insurrection, and while some scholars suggest that the anti-lockdown protests were a “trial-run” for the insurrectionist storming of the Capitol (Bratich 2021), it remains an empirical question as to whether these protests against stay-at-home orders helped coordinate and facilitate later political violence at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Using original data from two national samples of Americans collected during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020 (N = 2,563) and one year after the insurrection in January 2022 (N=2,223), we find that anti-lockdown protesters were indeed more likely to participate in the January 6th insurrection. Moreover, individuals sympathetic to white nationalists, particularly the alt-right, and whom expressed explicit outgroup racism, were more likely to select into participation in anti-lockdown protests and in-turn, violence at the Capitol. Results from a survey experiment manipulating out-group racial attribution confirm a white nationalist social identity mechanism for mobilization across both events and speak to the literature on the role of “ethnic entrepreneurs” in the mobilization for political violence.

Authors

• Katherine M. Sawyer, Stony Brook University

• Kanisha Bond, Binghamton University

• Hannah Nam, Stony Brook University