A recent study published in the journal Injury Epidemiology revealed a significant shift in Americans’ attitudes towards political violence between 2022 and 2023. While the overall support for political violence declined, the expectation of firearm use in such scenarios saw an alarming rise. These findings highlight a complex and evolving landscape of support for political violence in the United States.
Political violence, defined as the use of force or violence to advance political objectives, poses a severe threat to democratic processes and public safety. Previous reports and surveys have documented a worrying trend of rising political violence and extremist beliefs, prompting the need for a deeper exploration of public attitudes towards these issues.
“We’ve studied firearm violence for decades, and anomalous trends in purchasing in 2021 led us to conduct a survey on support for and personal willingness to engage in political violence in 2022,” said study author Garen J. Wintemute, the Baker–Teret Chair in Violence Prevention and Distinguished Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Davis
“The results surprised us: 32.8% of the population thought violence was usually or always justified to advance at least one specific political objective. We thought it important to study change over time, and the new paper reports our findings on those same measures in 2023.”
The study is the second wave of a nationally representative cohort survey conducted by researchers from the University of California, Davis, and administered by the survey research firm Ipsos. The first wave took place in 2022, with 12,947 respondents participating. For the second wave in 2023, the researchers re-surveyed 9,385 of the original respondents, maintaining a high retention rate of 84.2%.
Participants were drawn from the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, an online research panel representative of the U.S. adult population. The survey was available in both English and Spanish and included a wide range of demographic variables to ensure comprehensive coverage of the population.
The survey focused on three broad domains: beliefs regarding democracy and the potential for violence, views on American society and institutions, and support for and willingness to engage in political violence. Participants were asked about their views on the justification of political violence for various objectives and their personal willingness to engage in such violence, including the likelihood of using firearms.
One of the study’s central findings was a decrease in general support for political violence. In 2022, nearly one-third of Americans considered violence justified to advance certain political objectives. By 2023, this number had dropped to 25.3%. Similarly, the belief that civil war is imminent in the United States declined from 13.7% in 2022 to 5.7% in 2023.
“Support for political violence declined from 2022 to 2023, but 2023 wasn’t an election year. We’re in the field right now with the 2024 questionnaire, and we’ll see if there’s been a rebound as elections approach again,” Wintemute told PsyPost.
“We were surprised in 2022 by the finding that 14% of respondents strongly or very strongly agreed with the assertion that ‘in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.’ That proportion fell to 5.7% in 2023 (again, not an election year), but of those who still thought civil war was coming, nearly 40% also agreed strongly or very strongly that ‘the United States needs a civil war to set things right.'”
Despite the decline in support for political violence, the study found an increase in the predicted use of firearms in such scenarios. In 2023, 9% of respondents believed it very likely they would be armed with a gun in a situation where they considered political violence justified, up from previous years. The proportion of respondents who thought it likely they would shoot someone in such a situation also increased slightly, highlighting a concerning trend towards the normalization of armed violence in political conflicts.
While the study provides valuable insights, it also has limitations. The findings are subject to sampling error and nonresponse bias, though the high response rate for the second wave (84%) mitigates some concerns. Additionally, external events such as high-profile mass shootings and political developments may have influenced respondents’ views.
“It’s a longitudinal survey; we’re contacting the same people each year at about the same time,” Wintemute noted. “Wave 3 is in the field now, and we hope to have results from 2024 data by the end of the summer. There’s much more to come from this project.”
The study, “Single-year change in views of democracy and society and support for political violence in the USA: findings from a 2023 nationally representative survey“, was authored by Garen J. Wintemute, Sonia L. Robinson, Andrew Crawford, Elizabeth A. Tomsich, Paul M. Reeping, Aaron B. Shev, Bradley Velasquez, and Daniel Tancredi.