Imagine you were asked this question: “Thinking about American politics today, what one person do you think is causing the most harm to America?”
Then, you were asked whether you support or oppose each of the following actions toward that person:
- Kill [actor]
- Hit [actor] with a car
- Throw rocks and bottles at [actor]
- Punch [actor] in the face
- Throw a brick through [actor’s] window
- Protest outside [actor’s] home while openly carrying weapons
- Send a package to [actor’s] office that looks like a bomb
- Send threatening messages to [actor]
- Publicly share information about [actor’s] whereabouts
- Curse in [actor’s] face
You could choose anything from “strongly support” to “strongly oppose” on a five-category scale, where the middle category is “neither support nor oppose.”
This measure of support for political aggression or violence comes from a newly published article by Scott Clifford, Lucia Lopez, and Lucas Lothamer. Careful readers of this newsletter may remember an earlier edition in which I discussed the challenges of measuring support for political violence. (See also this newly published review by two scholars, Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, who have studied this topic extensively.)
There are a few challenges that this new measure – the “most harmful actor” measure – seeks to address. One is that other measures can have relatively ambiguous or generic targets, like whether you support violence against “members of the other side” or the “government.” Another is that measures are sometimes vague about what exactly “violence” means. Measures also vary in whether they specify the other party as the target.
The new measure builds on an idea from the measurement of political tolerance: In terms of support for civil liberties, it is useful to know whether people will extend liberties even to groups that they oppose. In the tolerance literature, a prominent measure asks people for their “least-liked group” and then asks whether they would let this group, say, publicly march in their community.
Here’s what Clifford and colleagues find. First, when asked this question in February 2024, the vast majority of people named either then-President Joe Biden (46%) or Donald Trump (46%). There is probably a separate paper to be written on how and why people center so readily on the president.
Here is the proportion of people supporting political aggression or violence against the person they named:
There is little support for several of these acts. A larger fraction would support punching the person in the face, sharing the person’s location, or cursing at this person. Overall, about 30% of people reject all of these acts – that is, they score at the lowest possible value on a scale built from these measures.
This 30% figure is much higher than the equivalent figure on a standard measure of partisan political violence. People appear more likely to reject partisan violence (e.g., when answering questions like “When (if ever) is it OK for [in-partisans] to send physical threats and intimidating messages to [out-party] leaders?”) than they are to reject violence against this most harmful figure.
In other words, as the authors note, there may be something of a “principle-implementation gap”: Some people will reject partisan political violence in the abstract but endorse it when it comes to the person they think is harming America.
This becomes especially clear in a follow-up experiment. Clifford and colleagues asked about support for aggressive or violent acts but varied the target: an ordinary person in the opposite party, an unnamed leader in the opposite party, or the person that people considered most harmful. Here are those results:
You can see how much more often participants endorse aggression or violence when they are thinking about this “most harmful” person (the green bars).
Now, we have to be cautious in interpreting survey-based measures of support for political violence. As previous research and Clifford and colleagues find, endorsement of political violence is more prevalent among survey respondents who appear to be paying less attention to the survey or responding insincerely. This problem is not as prevalent in this “most harmful person” measure as it is in some other measures of political violence, but it’s still real.
Nevertheless, I think this way of measuring support for political violence helps us understand something important. In my earlier newsletter on this topic, I noted that people appear to be more willing to endorse specific acts of political violence (like the January 6th attack) even if they appear to reject violence in general. This is another example of the principle-implementation gap.
If the “most harmful actor” measure is any indication, we should expect this gap to appear and reappear. It will be an ongoing test of whether people’s abstract opposition to political violence is set aside when the target is someone they fear.
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