CORRELATES OF VIOLENT POLITICAL EXTREMISM IN THE UNITED STATES*

• Author: GARY LAFREE,PATRICK A. JAMES,MICHAEL A. JENSEN,AARON SAFER‐LICHTENSTEIN
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12169

CORRELATES OF VIOLENT POLITICAL EXTREMISM

IN THE UNITED STATES∗

GARY LAFREE, MICHAEL A. JENSEN, PATRICK A. JAMES,

and AARON SAFER-LICHTENSTEIN

University of Maryland—College Park

KEYWORDS: extremist crime, open source data, political violence, radicalization

Although research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, few scholars have

applied criminological theories to the analysis of individual-level political extremism.

Instead, researchers focused on radicalization have drawn primarily from political

science and psychology and have overwhelmingly concentrated on violent extremists,

leaving little variation in the dependent variable. With the use of a newly available data

set, we test whether variables derived from prominent criminological theories are help-

ful in distinguishing between nonviolent and violent extremists. The results show that

variables related to social control (lack of stable employment), social learning (radical

peers), psychological perspectives (history of mental illness), and criminal record all

have significant effects on participation in violent political extremism and are robust

across multiple techniques for imputing missing data. At the same time, other common

indicators of social control (e.g., education and marital status) and social learning per-

spectives (e.g., radical family members) were not significant in the multivariate models.

We argue that terrorism research would benefit from including criminology insights

and by considering political radicalization as a dynamic, evolving process, much as

life-course criminology treats more common forms of crime.

Although there has been explosive growth in criminological research on terrorism

in recent years (for reviews, see Forst, Greene, and Lynch, 2011; Freilich and LaFree,

2015; LaFree and Ackerman, 2009; Lum and Kennedy, 2012), few scholars have drawn

on major criminological theories to explain individual-level participation in extremist

political violence. More commonly, in the rapidly growing literature on radicalization

∗This research was supported by the National Institute of Justice through Award 2012-ZA-BX-0005,

the Science and Technology Directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through

Award 2012-ST-061-CS-0001, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation

program under Award 699824. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of

the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either

expressed or implied, of the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Homeland Secu-

rity, or the European Union. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2017 workshop

on Studying Violent Political Extremism, Les Diablerets, Switzerland, and the National Academy

of Science 2017 workshop on Understanding the Roots and Trajectories of Violent Extremism,

Paris, France. The authors would like to thank Omi Hodwitz, Allison Smith, John Stevenson, the

anonymous reviewers and editors, and our amazing colleagues at the National Consortium for the

Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).

Direct correspondence to Gary LaFree, University of Maryland-START Center, 8400 Baltimore

Avenue, College Park, MD 20740 (e-mail: glafree@crim.umd.edu).

C2018 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12169

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 56 Number 2 233–268 2018 233

234 LAFREE ET AL.

and extremism, researchers have borrowed insights from political science (Abrahms,

2012; Schmid and Jongman, 1988), psychology (Horgan, 2005; Kruglanski et al., 2014),

sociology (Boyns and Ballard, 2004; Oberschall, 2004), and communications (Corman,

Trethewey, and Goodall, 2008; Matusitz, 2014), as well as from cognate subject areas,

such as membership in religious cults (Crenshaw, 2000; Post, Ruby, and Shaw, 2002),

and nonideological street gangs (Decker and Pyrooz, 2011). The lack of criminological

explanations for individual-level extremism is surprising, considering that “[t]errorism is

a form of crime in all essential respects” (Clarke and Newman, 2006: i). Indeed, political

violence seems to fall within the domain of criminology famously defined by Sutherland

(1947) as encompassing research on “the breaking of laws and reactions to the breaking

of laws.”

At the same time, political violence clearly differs in important respects from ordinary

crime (LaFree and Dugan, 2004), which may help explain why researchers have rarely

used dominant criminological theories to explain extremist political behavior. Most street

crimes do not have larger political purposes, whereas the overriding objective of political

violence, and its ultimate justification, is the furtherance of a political cause (Crenshaw

and Horowitz, 1983; LaFree, Dugan, and Miller, 2015). Similarly, although common

criminals vary widely in terms of how they perceive their illegal behavior (cf. Anderson,

2000; Black, 1998; Katz, 1988), few criminals see their crimes as altruistic. By contrast,

terrorists frequently believe that they are serving a cause that will achieve a greater

good for some wider constituency (Hoffman, 1998; Ja´

sko, LaFree, and Kruglanski, 2016;

McCauley and Moskalenko, 2011). And finally, even though those who commit common

crimes usually try to avoid detection, those who commit acts of political violence are often

seeking the largest audience possible (Held, 2004; Kydd and Walter, 2006; Pape, 2005).

Although these differences are undoubtedly important, the fact remains that there

are fundamental similarities between political violence and more common forms of

crime, making perspectives from criminology potentially useful for understanding the

characteristics and motivations of political extremists (Hamm, 2007; Kittrie, 1978;

Rosenfeld, 2004; Smith and Damphousse, 1998; Turk, 2004). Ordinary crime and political

violence are both social constructions that derive meaning from interactions that produce

rules and norms (LaFree et al., 2015). Both acts undermine social trust, producing

similar deleterious effects on the communities in which they occur (Anderson, 2000;

Kirk and Matsuda, 2011). And perhaps most importantly, the individuals who commit

ordinary crimes and those who perpetrate acts of terrorism are similar in terms of basic

characteristics, with young men engaging in both acts to a far greater extent than other

demographic groups (Braithwaite, 1989; DeLisi, Neppl, Lohman, Vaughn, and Shook,

2013; Gendreau, Little, and Goggin, 1996; Wilson and Herrnstein, 1985).

In this article, we draw on several prominent criminological theories of ordinary

crime to develop a set of exploratory hypotheses about the determinants of politically

motivated violence. We then test these hypotheses on a newly available data set of 1,473

individuals based in the United States who have been publicly involved in ideologically

motivated violent and nonviolent criminal acts, or who are known members of foreign

or domestic extremist organizations. Although we cannot provide definitive tests of all

rival criminology theories, our goal is to assess the extent to which common perspectives

from criminology can improve our understanding of individual-level violent extremism.

Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of prominent criminological perspectives on

crime as they relate to political extremism is important for several reasons.

CORRELATES OF VIOLENT POLITICAL EXTREMISM 235

First, mainstream criminology has paid insufficient attention to violent extremists as

an important subgroup of criminals, which raises concerns about the scope limitations of

the field’s dominant theories. It remains unclear whether key variables from prominent

theories maintain their explanatory power when they are applied to political extremists.

This analysis allows us to identify where dominant criminological arguments fall short and

to provide suggestions for useful theoretical emendations.

Second, the design of this study allows for us to assess the extent to which prominent

criminological arguments can be used to explain an uncommon but extreme form of crim-

inal behavior. Theories of crime are of the most use when they can explain not only who

engages in criminal acts but also who engages in the most extreme forms of crime. Indeed,

a crucial first step in leveraging criminological theory for practical use by law enforce-

ment, intelligence, and countering violent extremism (CVE) practitioners is determining

whether prominent arguments can be used to differentiate between those who engage in

violence versus those who engage in less extreme forms of crime. By comparing violent

and nonviolent political extremists, we provide an initial test of the explanatory reach of

key criminological theories.

Finally, a baseline criminological analysis of political extremists is a crucial step toward

developing a criminological theory of politically motivated crime. Criminologists and

terrorism scholars often reach different conclusions about which variables most strongly

correlate to crime and terrorism. To formulate robust theories of terrorism, it is critical

to understand how extremists differ from more ordinary criminals.

Through our research, we also respond to two prominent weaknesses in prior research

on extremism. First, most researchers (Horgan, 2005; Pape, 2005; Sageman, 2004) have

only analyzed individuals who have used violence for an extremist cause but have not con-

sidered those who may share similar ideological convictions but have not used violence

in their pursuit (Borum, 2011). Thus, the inferential power and external validity of many

prior studies have been limited by the fact that there is little variation in the dependent

variable. There have been recent attempts to address this limitation (Gartenstein-Ross

and Grossman, 2009; Kurzman, 2015; Smith and Damphousse, 2007), but thus far, few

researchers have included subsets of radicalized individuals who did not commit violence.

Second, although important work has been done tracing the radicalization pathways

of individuals and small groups, variously highlighting the role of psychological processes

(Horgan, 2008; Kruglanski, Chen, Dechesne, Fishman, and Orehek, 2009), small group

dynamics (De Bie and De Poot, Pisoiu, 2015; Sageman, 2004), and social movement cat-

alysts (della Porta, 2006; Wiktorowicz, 2004, 2005), most of the scholars conducting these

studies relied on qualitative case studies to support their claims. Few researchers to date

have used systematically collected quantitative data to generate inferences.

The remainder of the article proceeds in four sections. First, we review important con-

cepts derived from prominent criminological theories and extract exploratory hypotheses

that explain why individuals may be more likely to engage in acts of political violence as

opposed to provide nonviolent criminal support for extremist causes. Second, we detail

the data and methodology used to test the hypotheses, including a discussion of how our

independent, dependent, and control variables are measured and how we compensate for

missing values in our data set. Third, we discuss the results of our analyses, which include

several robustness tests of our findings. Finally, we conclude with the implications of the

study for advancing both criminological theory and public policy on countering violent

extremism.