Understanding Radical American Partisanship
Thursday, May 13, 202111:30 AM - 12:30 PM (Pacific)
Online, via Zoom: REGISTER
About the Event:
Political violence is rising in the United States, alarming citizens and leaders alike. How many Americans endorse partisan violence and other forms of extreme hostility? What are its deep social, political, historical, and psychological roots? What can be done about it? And what does it mean for democracy?
In this talk, Drs. Mason and Kalmoe make sense of our contentious politics with a groundbreaking study of radicalism among ordinary American partisans. Their individual-level studies utilize more than a dozen new nationally representative surveys and experiments to trace recent trends since 2017, reactions to elections and violent events, broader conditions that spur support for violence, links from violence attitudes to aggressive behavior, and the role of leaders in enflaming or pacifying their followers.
The results reshape the study of modern American political behavior by showing that ordinary partisanship is far more volatile than scholars have recognized in the past century of study.
About the Speaker(s)