When Push Comes To Shove: How Americans Evaluate Acts of Political Violence

What factors do Americans find most important when evaluating acts of political violence? We employ a pre-registered conjoint experiment to answer this question. Normatively, details regarding the violent act (e.g., the target and violence severity) should determine the punishment for political violence. However, Social Identity Theory suggests evaluations of political violence may depend on the perpetrator’s characteristics and the relationship between the social identities of perpetrators and evaluators. Through varying both perpetrator characteristics and features of the violent act, we 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 excusal of 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.