When push comes to shove: How Americans excuse and condemn political violence

Phillips, Joseph B., Munis, B. Kal, Huffman, Nicole, Memovic, Arif and Ford, Jacob 2025. When push comes to shove: How Americans excuse and condemn political violence. Political Behavior 10.1007/s11109-025-10009-7

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Abstract

What factors do Americans find most important when evaluating acts of political violence? Normatively, details regarding the violent act (e.g., the target and violence severity) should determine the punishment for political violence. However, recent work on polarization and identity suggests evaluations of political violence may depend on the perpetrator’s characteristics. In two pre-registered conjoint experiments, we vary both perpetrator characteristics and features of the violent act to discern the relative weight of act-centric and perpetrator-centric considerations. We find that even though the perpetrator’s characteristics (e.g., partisanship) do influence people’s punishment of political violence, the features of the act matter much more for citizen evaluations of political violence, on average. Though these findings can be interpreted as normatively negative given the perpetrator’s identities do influence punishment, the disproportionate effect of the violent act’s target and severity are normatively encouraging.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Cardiff Law & Politics Schools > Department of Politics and International Relations (POLIR) Research Institutes & Centres > Wales Governance Centre (WGCES)
Publisher:	Springer
ISSN:	0190-9320
Funders:	Utah Valley University Innovation Academy, McCourtney Institute of Democracy
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	21 January 2025
Date of Acceptance:	21 January 2025
Last Modified:	25 Mar 2025 11:47
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/175486

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