Partisanship and the Evaluation of Threats & Violence against Elected Officials

• In Event: Political Violence, Threats, and Political Behavior

Abstract

Incivility, threats, and violence targeting elected officials have increased recently; patterns which highlight the fragility of American democracy. For instance, in 2020, Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan announced that she would not be seeking re-election, partly due to threats of violence. In recent years, threats of violence have targeted public health officials (Mello, Greene, and Sharfstein 2020), Bureau of Land Management workers (Nemerever 2021), school board members (Reilley 2021), Congress members and staff (Wire 2021), state legislators (Herrick and Thomas 2021), and mayors (Herrick and Franklin 2019), among others. These behaviors on the part of the public may reflect a more extreme manifestation of broader trends toward uncivil discourse (Papacharissi 2004) and a small, but worrisome, willingness to justify political violence (Kalmoe and Mason 2022).

A central question brought up by the rise of these types of political threats and violence is how the partisan public responds to such criminal and undemocratic events? When exposed to stories about threats and violence against elected officials, do they become more measured in their political attitudes, or do they become more likely to embrace violence as a legitimate means? This is important because it could mean that media coverage of political violence could lead to a feedback process of more political violence.

This research draws on the literature on partisan social identities, motivated reasoning, incivility, and political violence to develop expectations for how partisans in the public may respond to information about threats and violence targeting political elites from both parties. Despite criticism of threats and violence from both sides, evaluations of civil, uncivil, and violent behavior may not be politically neutral. This is because partisanship is a core part of people’s identity (Mason 2018) and shapes how they interpret events and information. Partisan identities create strong in-groups and out-groups and in-group favoritism is associated with different yardsticks for evaluating in-group and out-group legislators (Bauer, Harbridge-Yong and Krupnikov 2017). Partisanship also plays a role in how people understand misbehavior. Partisans are more willing to rationalize (Walter and Redlawsk 2019) and excuse in-group leaders’ misbehavior (Filindra and Harbridge-Yong 2022). They also evaluate norms breaking by the in-group less severely than similar behavior by the out-group (Graham and Svolik 2020) and rationalize undemocratic behaviors if they promote desired policies (Krishnarajan 2023). This suggests that threats and violence perpetrated by co-partisans toward an opponent may not be viewed as seriously or be seen as concerning as the same behaviors by opposing partisans toward a co-partisan legislator.

Another concern about the public response to threats and violence against elected officials is that learning about threats or violence, particularly if they are perpetrated by members of the opposing party and target an elected official from one’s in-group, might increase people’s willingness to rationalize violence or engage in violence themselves. We know that the public’s response to political violence is shaped by social identities (Filindra 2023). When group identities are under threat, partisans can be induced to become radicalized and endorse violence towards members of the other side (Kalmoe and Mason 2022). Even though few endorse actual violence (e.g., physically harming people) (Westwood et al. 2022), support for the principle of political violence can nevertheless be harmful as it weakens democratic norms.

We hypothesize that partisans may respond differently to threats or violence when the target is a co-partisan legislator (and the angry constituents are from the opposing party) relative to when the target is from the opposing party (and the angry constituents are from their own party). For threats and violence directed at a co-partisan legislator, we expect that partisans will show increased animosity toward the opposing party and higher levels of violent radicalization. By contrast, for threats and violence directed at an opposing party legislator, we expect that partisans (who share an in-group with the constituents) will rationalize violence (e.g., blame the politician, view this as the way politics works).

We test these expectations with two pre-registered survey experiments. Our experiments randomize respondents to read about a neutral control (a civil townhall), a protest control (non-violent), a protest where constituents make threats, and a protest where violence is directed at the legislator. We also randomize the partisanship of legislator. The results suggest that while people do recognize differences in civility/appropriateness within democratic politics as well as the severity of incidents, the partisanship of the target has a more muted impact than theorized.

Authors

• Alexandra Filindra, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Laurel Harbridge-Yong, Northwestern University

• Andrea A Manning, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Paul Teas, University of Illinois Chicago