Partisan Bias in Episodes of Political Violence

• Published date: 01 July 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X241236198
• Author: Justin Michael Zyla
• Date: 01 July 2024

Article

American Politics Research

2024, Vol. 52(4) 451–462

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X241236198

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Partisan Bias in Episodes of Political Violence

Justin Michael Zyla

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Abstract

Imagine two incidents of political violence. In the f‌irst, you share political aff‌iliation with the victim. In the second, theyreside in

the opposite party. How would this minor change –a shifting label, the difference of a word –impact your reaction? This article

offers empirical insight through an experiment: U.S. participants read a mock college controversy, where a student sent death

threats to, and doxed, a professor. The treatment varied whether the perpetrator described the professor as a Democrat,

Republican, or used otherwise non-descript (e.g., “political”) adjectives. A posttreatment survey then measured respondents’

discrete emotions, the penalties they preferred the student receive, and their partisan group identity strength.Participants who

read about violence against a copartisan victim showed a statistically signif‌icant increase in preferred penalty severity. But

violence against an outparty victim mirrored the control, with subjects reacting as if they didn’t know the political aff‌iliation of

anyone involved. Posttreatment measures also demonstrated the potential for anxiety (but not anger or partisan strength) to

mediate this underlying partisan bias.

Keywords

emotions, experiment, intergroup relations, partisan bias, political psychology, political violence

On January 6th, 2020, a rally supporting (then) President

Donald J. Trump brought violence to Washington, D.C.

Protesters broke the U.S. Capitol, attacking federal police and

demanding that Congress refuse to certify the electoral

victory of Trump’s political rival, President Joseph R. Biden.

We call this, “1/6,”stitching its signif‌icance to 9/11, and with

the event capturing vivid renderings of electoral violence

rarely seen in recent U.S. history. Just a few short months

prior, shooting events during Black Lives Matter (BLM)

protests had raised the specter of partisan violence. An ad-

olescent in Kenosha, Wisconsin killed two BLM protesters,

and that same week, a member of the anti-fascist group,

Antifa, shot and killed a far-right counter-protester in Port-

land, Oregon.

Affective polarization raises concerns that the partisanship

of actors involved in events like the 2020 shootings in Ke-

nosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon –or the January 6th

attack on the U.S. Capitol –matters. Partisan bias might exist

in how members of the public assign guilt and discern penalty

preferences, cutting against the U.S. ideal of fair and impartial

adjudication. This leads to the crucial research questions

guiding this project: to what extent (if any) does partisan bias

shape reactions to political violence? And which discrete

emotions mediate these relationships?

While surveys routinely focus on public opinion related to

political violence (e.g., Armaly & Enders, 2022;Kalmoe &

Mason, 2022), Westwood et al. (2022) recently challenged

this body of work, advocating for specif‌ic outcome measures

and context-rich treatments to better untangle our

understanding of political violence. In addition, scientists

rarely manipulate the partisanship of actors involved. Sur-

veys, then, suggest that most U.S. citizens categorically reject

political violence in the abstract (e.g., Voelkel et al., n.d). We

know much less, however, about how individuals react to

concrete episodes of partisan violence, which seem, unfor-

tunately, all too common in U.S. politics.

Beyond assessing partisan bias, the experiment examines

the role of three potential mediators: anger, anxiety, and

partisan strength. Partisan strength intends to operationalize

social identity theory, whereas anger and anxiety are common

mechanisms proposed within the theory of coalitional psy-

chology. Examining discrete emotional mechanisms helps

unpack the “affective”aspects of polarization. This seems

especially important considering how a simple positive-

negative valence view of affect fails to capture the nu-

anced manifestations of bias operating through discrete

emotions (Butz & Yogeeswaran, 2011;Lerner & Keltner,

2000;Neuberg et al., 2020;Weber, 2012). Anger and anxiety,

for example, activate unique suites of cognitive and physi-

ological reactions that should differentially impact attitudes

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Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Justin Michael Zyla, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State

University, Coor Hall - Sixth Floor, 975 S. Myrtle Avenue, Tempe, AZ 85287-

3902, USA.

Email: jmzyla@asu.edu