Political violence has entered the public agenda with force not only in advanced democracies but also in new democracies, even. But it is far from being something new. To stay just in the USA, where Trump suffered several assassination attempts, Bob Kennedy, candidate for President, was assassinated in the middle of the campaign, weeks after his historic public leader was killed.
The current agenda, however, is strongly marked by the relationships between political violence, affective polarization and anti-democratic attitudes, which . Intolerance and partisan polarization/animosity are growing; however, there is no consensus on whether they necessarily imply extreme acts. There are currently two competing positions in political science: the first is that interparty animosity is intrinsically related to ; the second is that these are phenomena with .
The most comprehensive study ever carried out on the interrelationship between these issues has just been published in Science and is co-authored by 76 researchers, including the most important experts on the subject. Titled “”, the work is experimental in nature. A representative sample of 32,000 Americans participates in the study.
The treatment group is exposed to videos or information correcting stereotypes related to 25 variables of interest; videos of Republicans/Democrats that are representative, but avoid stereotypes (e.g. that Republicans are rich or very religious); or the treatment group is asked how members of the rival party would tolerate undemocratic practices, after which they are corrected with real polling data on the issue and tested on the effect of this new information, etc.
In the sample as a whole, the level of support for partisan violence is low, although worrying (10, on a scale of 1 to 100). Support for undemocratic practices is moderate but also alarming (score of 26). In general, a is high (69) and distrust of social rivals is moderate (53). One of the study’s counterintuitive findings is that support for partisan violence is higher among Democrats. After all, violence is associated in public opinion with radical sectors of the right. The scores regarding the desire for social distancing are also higher among Democrats. On the other hand, approval of undemocratic practices is higher among Republicans. The most important finding is that the correlation between affective polarization and support for violence is not significant.
The researchers reach optimistic conclusions: in 23 of the 25 interventions in the control group there was a reduction in interparty animosity of around 5%. This is a considerable reduction considering that animosity increased by 21 points between 1978 and 2016. In relation to partisan violence, one of the treatments produced the opposite effect, increasing support for partisan violence. These effects diminished after two weeks, which highlights the considerable challenges for a “republican pedagogy” as a remedy against polarization and political violence.
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