It’s just a joke. How age and gender condition reactions to intra-party violence

Sexual harassment, threats, and physical aggression between politicians are increasingly problematized as a barrier to equal opportunities in political careers. However, we know little about how voters and politicians react to (reports of) such incidents. In this article, we employ an intersectional perspective to understand how people’s gender and age condition the notion that violence between politicians is acceptable. We draw on a unique survey experiment conducted simultaneously with citizens and politicians in Norway. While people mostly do not agree that violent behavior between politicians is acceptable, we find significant intersectional differences between gender and age groups in both the citizen and the politician sample. In general, young men are most accepting of violent behavior, whereas young women are least accepting. The effects seem to be partly driven by differences in the acceptability of sexually connoted behavior and are larger among politicians than among citizens. All results are robust to controlling for education, political experience, and party identification/ affiliation. The findings implicate that, in a post #MeToo era and in a gender-equal context, views on the acceptability of political violence are more gender-polarized amongst young generations.