Sean Jeremy Westwood - Measuring Rare Attitudes

Political scientists, pundits, and citizens worry that America is entering a new period of violent partisan conflict. Provocative survey data show that a large share of Americans (between 8% and 40%) support politically motivated violence. Yet, despite media attention, political violence is rare, amounting to a little more than 1% of violent hate crimes in the United States. We reconcile these seemingly conflicting facts with four large survey experiments (n = 4,904), demonstrating that self-reported attitudes on political violence are biased upward because of respondent disengagement and survey questions that allow multiple interpretations of political violence. Addressing question wording and respondent disengagement, we find that the median of existing estimates of support for partisan violence is nearly 6 times larger than the median of our estimates (18.5% versus 2.9%). Critically, we show the prior estimates overstate support for political violence because of random responding by disengaged respondents. Respondent disengagement also inflates the relationship between support for violence and previously identified correlates by a factor of 4. Partial identification bounds imply that, under generous assumptions, support for violence among engaged and disengaged respondents is, at most, 6.86%. Finally, nearly all respondents support criminally charging suspects who commit acts of political violence. These findings suggest that, although recent acts of political violence dominate the news, they do not portend a new era of violent conflict.