After a shocking assassination attempt earlier this month against Donald Trump, rising political violence is once again in the news. On Thursday afternoon, the Harvard Kennedy School convened a panel of scholars to discuss how Americans’ attitudes have changed—alarmingly, in some cases—during the past decade or so, and what strategies exist to defuse election-related violence in deeply polarized societies. The bottom line? “The fight to uphold democracy is all of our fights,” said Hardy Merriman, president of the nonprofit International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. “It is not just a fight that can be won through institutions.”
Echoing that sentiment, Johns Hopkins political scientist Lilliana Mason said, “It requires all of us. The more we think about it as our responsibility, rather than ‘Someone needs to fix this,’ the more we will be on a stronger path.”
Moderated by Stanton professor of the First Amendment Erica Chenoweth, the conversation was part of a webinar series on the 2024 election hosted by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Besides Merriman and Mason, the panel included Sarah Birch, a political scientist at King’s College London whose 2020 book, Electoral Violence, Corruption, and Political Order, examined how threats and force have been used in electoral processes around the globe since World War II.
Much of Thursday’s discussion focused on shifts in public attitudes toward political violence and the ways in which it has already eroded society. Recent studies, including some conducted by Mason, indicate that a growing number of Americans would tolerate physical attacks against members of the opposing party. The vast majority of people still reject violence, but polls show that about 15 percent approve of it. Most of them would never actually engage in violence, said Mason, “But the thing that concerns us is that they live in communities, and social norms are shaped in those communities.” As approval of violence goes up, social enforcement against it goes down.
Mason has been collecting data since 2017 on U.S. attitudes toward political violence and in 2022 she co-authored Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy. One finding she and her colleagues noted was a correspondence between attitude shifts and political events. “So, we saw a spike in approval of violent threats around both of Trump's impeachments, particularly among Republicans,” she said. “When partisans feel that their group is being threatened, they become more approving of violence.” But even apart from specific triggering events, Mason’s data showed that the more general increase in approval of political violence “really was mainly during Trump's administration,” she said. “What we saw were sort of gradually increasing levels of violence throughout 2017 to 2020. And then, during Biden's administration, we saw those feelings kind of simmer down.” The researchers’ most recent data, from June 2024, showed positive attitudes toward violence “ticking back up again,” she added, “which is not surprising during an election season.”
More alarming, Mason said, were the skyrocketing numbers when she and her colleagues asked people whether they approved of violence if the opposing party had used violence first. “In our 2020 data, we saw it go from 15 percent to 40 percent [of respondents] approving of violence,” in retaliation for violence from the other party. In the data from this June, the approval rates rose from about 20 percent to 60 percent, she said, “Both Democrats and Republicans saying, ‘If the other side starts it, then I think it's okay.’ And that's the first time we've ever seen it be over half of respondents saying, ‘Yeah, maybe.’”
One problem, Birch noted, is that, until recently, rising political violence in countries like the United States had been largely neglected by political science. “Most of the people who study electoral violence don’t also study democracy, and sometimes they don't even include established democracies in their data set,” she said. As a consequence, there’s been a lack of analysis. When she took a closer look at recent data, she said, “I discovered, to my horror, that electoral violence has actually increased quite a lot over the last 15 years in established democracies. …This is an area that really calls out for urgent attention by scholars.”
There are some things that scholars have discerned about violence in democracies, though: “It does not tend to be coordinated and orchestrated by political elites,” Birch said. “the way it usually is in other parts of the world where it's more prevalent.” And scholars have noted how violence or fear of violence lowers voter turnout during elections, a fact that complicates the decision-making of researchers and journalists who communicate with the public about threats of violence. “If we talk up the risk, we might actually be complicit in creating this atmosphere, where people are afraid.” But many questions remain unanswered, she said, including about the role that campaign rhetoric plays in attitudes toward political violence. “To my mind, perhaps the most interesting unanswered question is how the tenor of election campaigns and the discussions that take place between voters and between candidates during election campaigns might potentially indirectly contribute to electoral violence.”
In thinking about ways to push back against the growing acceptance of political violence, Merriman talked about the significance of the ballooning rate of violent threats. “Threats are right now, in my view, doing most of the damage,” he said. “The actual people being physically hurt or assaulted for their political views still is relatively low for a country of our size, but the threats have skyrocketed.” In 2017, he said, the number of threats recorded by the U.S. Capitol Police began rising sharply, and by 2022, had roughly doubled. That year the Capitol Police investigated about 7,500 threats: “Members of both parties, and every member of Congress received threats.” But only 46 threats, or 0.6 percent of the total, were prosecuted. The rest of the threats were made, he said, with “relative impunity.”
Many of the solutions that panelists described for countering acceptance of political violence turn out to be surprisingly simple. Having leaders condemn violence, consistently and forcefully, is powerful. “Most of our data has shown that it’s very easy for leaders to reduce approval of violence,” Mason said. “It’s quite simple. All they have to do is say, ‘Don’t do that.’ In survey experiments, we've repeatedly found this is effective.” And it works not only for national leaders: “Some of the most credible messengers…are people who are local and respected in communities,” said Merriman. “It may be better and more effective to have someone local to a community speaking a message rather than, for example, a celebrity or a state level official…. There’s a lot of power there.” Birch talked about the effectiveness in other countries of efforts to monitor and map hotspots of political electoral violence and then mobilize community leaders to encourage peace.
With limited government tools for dealing with threats—“the First Amendment protects lots and lots of scary things”—Merriman also emphasized the importance of solidarity. He is the author of “Harnessing Our Power to End Political Violence,” a guide to help people in communities across the country counter political violence. Ordinary citizens have the power to ensure that those who wield violent threats pay a social price. It’s also important that the victims of threats are supported. He and other speakers noted that a huge proportion of political violence and threats is directed at people who are not national figures like Trump, but poll workers and local election officials, who overwhelmingly are women and people of color. “We have an opportunity as citizens to shift the cost-benefit equation, particularly on the inciters and the threat-makers,” Merriman said. “You can really plan and do things strategically at the community level to increase the likelihood that political violence will backfire.”
Toward the end of the discussion, Birch summed it up this way: “It’s all about norms,” she said. “A community that will tolerate violence will get violence…. And so, I think it is down to every single citizen to condemn violence and to talk in such a way as to make it unacceptable.”
