How Do Offender Ideology and Offense Severity Impact Punitive Attitudes Toward Politically Motivated Offenders in the U.S.?

Abstract

How do punitive attitudes toward politically motivated offenders in the United States vary by the offender’s ideology? To address this, we conducted a survey experiment with U.S. adults (N = 1,100) in March 2023. Participants were randomly assigned to either the January 6th or Portland 2020 condition and indicated their punitive attitudes for three politically motivated offenses. Across ideologies, punitiveness toward politically motivated offenders increased with offense severity. Although some correlates of punitiveness toward typical offenders held for politically motivated offenders, most did not. Further, relationships varied as a function of offense type and offender ideology.

Acknowledgments

We thank Leah Butler, Austin Doctor, Kat Parsons and Callie Vitro for providing valuable feedback on this project at various stages.

Data Availability

Replication materials will be posted to Harvard’s Dataverse upon acceptance of the article.

Disclosure Statement

The authors declare no financial conflict of interest.

Notes

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3 For example, nearly 100 individuals faced federal charges stemming from criminal offenses during the Portland 2020 demonstrations, although roughly half of these cases have since been dropped. Associated Press, “Portland Protest Turns Violent, Federal Police Clear Plaza,” 22 August 2020, https://apnews.com/article/us-news-courts-wa-state-wire-id-state-wire-racial-injustice-89cfb2417b70cf41f55853cc69314834; Michael Casey, “Protests Peaceful in Boston by Day Turn Violent at Nightfall,” Associated Press, 1 June 2021, https://apnews.com/article/boston-ma-state-wire-massachusetts-virus-outbreak-george-floyd-e1fcd442e474dedc537b674426e08b8a; Helier Cheung, “George Floyd Death: Why Do Some Protests Turn Violent?,” BBC News, 31 May 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52869563; Sudhin Thanawala, “Protests, Some Violent, Spread in Wake of George Floyd Death,” Associated Press, 20 May 2020, https://apnews.com/article/nv-state-wire-az-state-wire-co-state-wire-fl-state-wire-virus-outbreak-baf3b29612527b8e9a841cb34f6f5789 U.S. Department of Justice, “74 People Facing Federal Charges in Crimes Committed during Portland Demonstrations,” 27 August 2020; Aruana Viswanatha and Sadie Gurman, “Almost Half of Federal Cases Against Portland Rioters Have Been Dismissed,” Wall Street Journal, 15 April 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/almost-half-of-federal-cases-against-portland-rioters-have-been-dismissed-11618501979.

4 Herbert M. Kritzer, “Political Protest and Political Violence: A Nonrecursive Causal Model,” Social Forces 55 no. 3 (1977): 630–40.

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6 Peter K. Enns, “The Public’s Increasing Punitiveness and Its Influence on Mass Incarceration in the United States,” American Journal of Political Science 58, no. 4 (2014): 857–72; David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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10 Brandon K. Applegate and Robin King Davis, “Public Views on Sentencing Juvenile Murderers: The Impact of Offender, Offense, and Perceived Maturity,” Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 4, no. 1 (2006): 55–74; Julia Campregher and Elizabeth L. Jeglic, “Attitudes toward Juvenile Sex Offender Legislation: The Influence of Case-Specific Information,” Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 25, no. 4 (2016): 466–82.

11 Nancy A. Heitzeg, “‘Whiteness,’ Criminality, and the Double Standards of Deviance/Social Control,” Contemporary Justice Review 18, no. 2 (2015): 197–214.

12 Binnal and Petersen, “They’re Just Different”; Campregher and Jeglic, “Attitudes toward Juvenile Sex Offender Legislation”; Cumberland and Zamble, “General and Specific Measures”; Levy, Cohen-Louck, and Herzog, “Predicting Support for Community Corrections.”

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14 Johnson, “Anger about Crime.”

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17 Joseph Spino and Denise Dellarosa Cummins, “The Ticking Time Bomb: When the Use of Torture Is and Is Not Endorsed,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5, no. 4 (2014): 543–63.

18 Erin M. Kearns and Joseph K. Young, Tortured Logic: Why Some Americans Support the Use of Torture in Counterterrorism (Columbia University Press, 2020).

19 For an exception, see Altier, “Criminal or Terrorist.”

20 Sandhya Dirks, “At the Jan. 6 Hearings, Race Isn’t Discussed Much. Still, It’s a Central Issue. National Public Radio,” 23 August 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/08/23/1117993012/january-6th-hearings-race; NPR, Jan. 6; Robert Pape and Kevin Ruby, “The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists,” The Atlantic, 2 February 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/the-capitol-rioters-arent-like-other-extremists/617895/; Scott Tong and Serena McMahon, “White, Employed and Mainstream: What We Know about the Jan. 6 Rioters One Year Later,” WBUR 3 January 2022, https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2022/01/03/jan-6-rioters-white-older

21 Michael K. Logan and Gina S. Ligon, “Come One, Come All: Individual-Level Diversity Among Anti-Fascists,” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 14, no. 2 (2021): 209–24.

22 Tong and McMahon, “White, Employed and Mainstream.”

23 Logan and Ligon, “Come One, Come All.”

24 Terrie E. Moffitt, “Adolescence-Limited and Life-Course-Persistent Antisocial Behavior: A Developmental Taxonomy,” Biosocial Theories of Crime (2017): 69–96; Terrie E. Moffitt, “Male Antisocial Behaviour in Adolescence and Beyond,” Nature Human Behaviour 2, no. 3 (2018): 177–86.

25 Travis Hirschi, “Self-Control and Crime,” In Handbook of Self-Regulation: Research, Theory, and Applications (Guilford Press, 2004), 537–52.

26 Michael Costelloe, Madeline Stenger, and Christine Arazan, “Punitiveness and Perceptions of Criminality: An Examination of Attitudes toward Immigrant Offenders,” Race and Justice 11 no. 4 (2021): 363–83; Barry C. Feld, “The Politics of Race and Juvenile Justice: The “Due Process Revolution” and the Conservative Reaction,” Justice Quarterly 20, no. 4 (2003): 765–800; Johnson, “Racial Prejudice”; Levy, Cohen-Louck, and Herzog, “Predicting Support for Community Corrections.”

27 Applegate and Davis, “Public Views on Sentencing Juvenile Murderers”; Binnal and Petersen, “They’re Just Different”; Campregher and Jeglic, “Attitudes toward Juvenile Sex Offender Legislation.”

28 Joshua C. Cochran, Elisa L. Toman, Ryan T. Shields, and Daniel P. Mears, “A Uniquely Punitive Turn? Sex Offenders and the Persistence of Punitive Sanctioning,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 58, no. 1 (2021): 74–118; Christi Metcalfe and Justin T. Pickett, “Public Fear of Protesters and Support for Protest Policing: An Experimental Test of Two Theoretical Models,” Criminology 60, no. 1 (2022): 60–89; Sean Patrick Roche, Justin T. Pickett, and Marc Gertz, “The Scary World of Online News? Internet News Exposure and Public Attitudes toward Crime and Justice,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 32 (2016): 215–36.

29 Kearns and Young, Tortured Logic; Miron, Branscombe, and Biernat, “Motivated Shifting of Justice Standards”; O’Brien and Ellsworth, “More Than Skin Deep”; Norris, Larsen, and Stastny, “Social Perceptions of Torture”; Spino and Cummins, “The Ticking Time Bomb”; Tarrant, Branscombe, Warner, and Weston, “Social Identity and Perceptions of Torture.”

30 Applegate and Davis, “Public Views on Sentencing Juvenile Murderers”; Camille D. Burge and Gbemende Johnson, “Race, Crime, and Emotions,” Research & Politics 5, no. 3 (2018); Edie Greene, Lauren Duke, and William Douglas Woody, “Stereotypes Influence Beliefs about Transfer and Sentencing of Juvenile Offenders,” Psychology, Crime & Law 23, no. 9 (2017): 841–58; Levy, Cohen-Louck, and Herzog, “Predicting Support for Community Corrections”; Kelly M. Socia, Jason Rydberg, and Christopher P. Dum, “Punitive Attitudes toward Individuals Convicted of Sex Offenses: A Vignette Study,” Justice Quarterly 38, no. 6 (2021): 1262–89.

31 Heitzeg, “‘Whiteness,’ Criminality, and the Double Standards.”

32 Socia, Rydberg, and Dum, “Punitive Attitudes.”

33 Applegate and Davis, “Public Views on Sentencing Juvenile Murderers.”

34 Levy, Cohen-Louck, and Herzog, “Predicting Support for Community Corrections.”

35 Altier, “Criminal or Terrorist”; Vito D’Orazio and Idean Salehyan, “Who Is a Terrorist? Ethnicity, Group Affiliation, and Understandings of Political Violence,” International Interactions 44, no. 6 (2018): 1017–39; Devorah Manekin and Tamar Mitts, “Effective for Whom? Ethnic Identity and Nonviolent Resistance,” American Political Science Review 116, no. 1 (2022): 161–80; Harley Williamson and Kristina Murphy, “Animus toward Muslims and Its Association with Public Support for Punitive Counter-Terrorism Policies: Did the Christchurch Terrorist Attack Mitigate This Association?” Journal of Experimental Criminology (2020): 1–21.

36 Binnal and Petersen, “They’re Just Different”; Cumberland and Zamble, “General and Specific Measures”; Levy, Cohen-Louck, and Herzog, “Predicting Support for Community Corrections.”

37 Altier, “Criminal or Terrorist?.”

38 Ibid., 16.

39 Altier, “Criminal or Terrorist”; Katherine Lacasse and Maggie Campbell-Obaid, “Investigating Factors That Alter Public Support for Countering Violent Extremism Intervention Programs for At-Risk Youth,” Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression (2022): 1–21.

40 Connor Huff and Joshua D. Kertzer, “How the Public Defines Terrorism,” American Journal of Political Science 62, no. 1 (2018): 55–71.

41 Cochran et al., “A Uniquely Punitive Turn?.”

42 Costelloe, Stenger, and Arazan, “Punitiveness and Perceptions of Criminality”; Johnson, “Racial Prejudice”; Metcalfe and Pickett, “Public Fear of Protesters.”

43 Eva G. T. Green, Christian Staerkle, and David O. Sears, “Symbolic Racism and Whites’ Attitudes Towards Punitive and Preventive Crime Policies,” Law and Human Behavior 30 (2006): 435–54; Donald P. Haider-Markel, Mark R. Joslyn, Ranya Ahmed, and Sammy Badran, “Looters or Political Protesters? Attributions for Civil Unrest in American Cities,” Social Science Research 75 (2018): 168–78; Johnson, “Racial Prejudice”; Metcalfe and Pickett, “Public Fear of Protesters”; R. C. Morris and Ryan Jerome LeCount, “The Value of Social Control: Racial Resentment, Punitiveness, and White Support for Spending on Law Enforcement,” Sociological Perspectives 63, no. 5 (2020): 697–718.

44 Pearce Edwards and Daniel Arnon, “Violence on Many Sides: Framing Effects on Protest and Support for Repression,” British Journal of Political Science 51, no. 2 (2021): 488–506; Jason Giersch, “Punishing Campus Protesters Based on Ideology,” Research & Politics 6, no. 4 (2019); Eden Hennessey, Matthew Feinberg, and Anne E. Wilson, “How Political Partisanship Can Shape Memories and Perceptions of Identical Protest Events,” PLoS One 16, no. 11 (2021); Johnson, “Racial Prejudice.”

45 Kearns and Young, Tortured Logic.

46 Costelloe, Stenger, and Arazan, “Punitiveness and Perceptions of Criminality”; Johnson, “Racial Prejudice.”

47 Metcalfe and Pickett, “Public Fear of Protesters.”

48 Francis T. Cullen, Leah C. Butler, and Amanda Graham, “Racial Attitudes and Criminal Justice Policy,” Crime and Justice 50, no. 1 (2021): 163–245; Johnson, “Racial Prejudice”; James D. Unnever and Francis Cullen, “Empathetic Identification and Punitiveness: A Middle-Range Theory of Individual Differences,” Theoretical Criminology 13 no. 3 (2009): 283–312.

49 Green, Staerkle, and Sears, “Symbolic Racism.”

50 Bobo and Johnson, “A Taste for Punishment.”

51 Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (University of Chicago Press, 1996).

52 Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., Shanto Iyengar, Adam Simon, and Oliver Wright, “Crime in Black and White: The Violent, Scary World of Local News,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 1, no. 3 (1996): 6–23.

53 Shaun L. Gabbidon, Helen Taylor Greene, and Vernetta D. Young, African American Classics in Criminology and Criminal Justice (Sage, 2002); Heitzeg, “‘Whiteness,’ Criminality, and the Double Standards”; Mary Beth Oliver, “African American Men as “Criminal and Dangerous”: Implications of Media Portrayals of Crime on the “Criminalization” of African American Men,” Journal of African American Studies (2003): 3–18.

54 Metcalfe and Pickett, “Public Fear of Protesters.”

55 Ibid.

56 Dirks, “At the Jan. 6 Hearings”; Logan and Ligon, “Come One, Come All”; Hilary Matfess and Devorah Margolin, “The Women of January 6th: A Gendered Analysis of the 21st Century American Far-Right,” Program on Extremism (Report), The George Washington University (2022); NPR, Jan. 6.

57 Metcalfe and Pickett, “Public Fear of Protesters.”

58 Ibid.

59 Applegate and Davis, “Public Views on Sentencing Juvenile Murderers”; Bobo and Johnson, “A Taste for Punishment”; Costelloe, Stenger, and Arazan, “Punitiveness and Perceptions of Criminality.”

60 Haider-Markel et al., “Looters or Political Protesters?.”

61 Kearns and Young, Tortured Logic.

62 Nicole Hahn Rafter, “The Social Construction of Crime and Crime Control,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 27, no. 4 (1990): 376–89.

63 See: Adam Ghazi-Tehrani and Erin M. Kearns, “Biased Coverage of Bias Crime: Examining Differences in Media Coverage of Hate Crimes and Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 46, no. 8 (2023): 1283–303, for a more detailed discussion of how Black’s work applies to understanding political motivated offenders and responses to them.

64 Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict,” in Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1979), 33–47.

65 Giersch, “Punishing Campus Protesters Based on Ideology.”

66 Edwards and Arnon, “Violence on Many Sides.”

67 Hennessey, Feinberg, and Wilson, “How Political Partisanship.”

68 Kearns and Young, Tortured Logic; Miron, Branscombe, and Biernat, “Motivated Shifting of Justice Standards”; O’Brien and Ellsworth, “More Than Skin Deep”; Norris, Larsen, and Stastny, “Social Perceptions of Torture”; Tarrant et al., “Social Identity and Perceptions of Torture.”

69 William D. Perreault, “Controlling Order-Effect Bias,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1975): 544–51.

70 Dirks, “At the Jan. 6 Hearings”; Logan and Ligon, “Come One, Come All”; Matfess and Margolin, “The Women of January 6^th”; NPR, Jan. 6.

71 Coup, insurrection, and terrorism are all forms of political violence by definition. Marsteintredet and Malamud (2020, 1015) state that a coup is “the illegal overthrow of the government by other state actors” that is “sudden, often military-backed”. The term insurrection has been defined in case law: “The open and active opposition, of a number of persons to the execution of the laws of the United States, of so formidable a nature as to defy for the time being the authority of the government, constitutes an insurrection, even though not accompanied by bloodshed, and not of sufficient magnitude to render success probable” (In re Charge to Grand Jury, 1894). The Global Terrorism Database defines terrorism as “the threatened or actual use of illegal force or violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.”

Leiv Marsteintredet and Andrés Malamud, “Coup with Adjectives: Conceptual Stretching or Innovation in Comparative Research?” Political Studies 68, no. 4 (2020): 1014–35; National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, Global Terrorism Database: Codebook: Methodology, Inclusion Criteria, and Variables, 2021. https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/downloads/Codebook.pdf

72 The terms disorganized riot, protest that got out of hand, and a mostly peaceful protest indicate events separate from political violence. Disorganized riot implies that there is violence/destruction, but not that there is an ideology motivating the action, so we do not code it as political violence. While protests are political, the fact that a protest gets out of hand suggests that the original event was driven by political motivations, but the subsequent violence was not. Last, a mostly peaceful protest suggests that the event, while political, entailed little, if any, political violence. Overall, 39.49% of participants described those who took part in the event they were assigned to as politically violent. However, this was significantly more common in the January 6th condition (44.05%) than in the Portland 2020 condition (24.44%), t(1097) = −6.98, p < .001).

73 Overall, 34.94% of participants described those who took part in the event they were assigned to as politically violent. However, this was significantly more common in the January 6th condition (42.47%) than in the Portland 2020 condition (27.24%), t(1097) = −5.29, p < .001).

74 This is the only independent variable for which there are significant differences in the distributions by condition. Participants in the January 6th condition were significantly more likely (57.19%) than participants in the Portland 2020 condition (36.75%) to describe the event and/or its participants as politically violent, t(1097) = −6.92, p < .001).

75 Costelloe, Chiricos, and Gertz, “Punitive Attitudes toward Criminals.”

76 Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color.

77 Amanda Graham, Francis T. Cullen, Leah C. Butler, Alexander L. Burton, and Velmer S. Burton, Jr., “Who Wears the MAGA Hat? Racial Beliefs and Faith in Trump,” Socius 7 (2021): 1–16.

78 Leah C. Butler, “Race and Redemption at a Correctional Turning Point” (Diss., University of Cincinnati, 2020).

79 Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead, “Christian Nationalism and White Racial Boundaries: Examining Whites’ Opposition to Interracial Marriage,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38, no. 10 (2015): 1671–89.

80 Joshua Davis, “Enforcing Christian Nationalism: Examining the Link between Group Identity and Punitive Attitudes in the United States,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 57, no. 2 (2018): 300–17 (313).

81 Dirks, “At the Jan. 6 Hearings”; Perry and Whitehead, “Christian Nationalism”; Samuel L. Perry, Andrew L. Whitehead, and Joshua T. Davis, “God’s Country in Black and Blue: How Christian Nationalism Shapes Americans’ Views about Police (Mis)Treatment of Blacks,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5, no. 1 (2019): 130–46.

82 Butler, Cullen, and Burton, Jr., “Racial Attitudes and Belief in Redeemability”; Stanley Feldman, “Structure and Consistency in Public Opinion: The Role of Core Beliefs and Values,” American Journal of Political Science (1988): 416–40; Stanley Feldman and Leonie Huddy, “Racial Resentment and White Opposition to Race-Conscious Programs: Principles or Prejudice?,” American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 1 (2005): 168–83.

83 Feldman, “Structure and Consistency,” 437.

84 Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color.

85 Butler, Race and Redemption; Feldman and Huddy, “Racial Resentment.”

86 Butler, Race and Redemption, 149.

87 Ibid.

88 Bob Altemeyer, Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism (Jossey-Bass, 1988), 168.

89 Butler, Race and Redemption.

90 Bobo and Johnson, “A Taste for Punishment”; Unnever and Cullen, “Empathetic Identification and Punitiveness.”

91 Altier, “Criminal or Terrorist”; Eric G. Lambert, Lous A. Ventura, Alan Clarke, O. Oko Elechi, David N. Baker, Morris Jenkins, and Daniel H. Hall, “United We Stand? Differences between White and Nonwhite College Students in Their Views on Terrorism and Punishment of Terrorists,” Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice 1 (2003): 91.

92 Haider-Markel, Joslyn, Ahmed, and Badran, “Looters or Political Protesters?”; Johnson, “Racial Prejudice”; Metcalfe and Pickett, “Public Fear of Protesters.”

93 See Appendix for a correlation matrix among independent and key control variables. While correlations among some of the independent variables are strong, the variance inflation factors for all regression models are under 2.0 and thus do not indicate multicollinearity. See Ron Johnston, Kelvyn Jones, and David Manley, “Confounding and Collinearity in Regression Analysis: A Cautionary Tale and an Alternative Procedure, Illustrated by Studies of British Voting Behaviour,” Quality & Quantity 52 (2018): 1957–76.

94 Raymond Paternoster, Robert Brame, Paul Mazerolle, and Alex Piquero, “Using the Correct Statistical Test for the Equality of Regression Coefficients,” Criminology 36, no. 4 (1998): 859–66.

95 As a robustness check, we estimated models with both Event Political Violence and Participants Politically Violent replacing the composite variable that is coded as 1 = yes if the participant indicated that either or both were the case. Fundamentally, results are unchanged. Variation among these models and those reported in text is a question of magnitude of findings rather than substantive differences in the results.

96 Enns, “The Public’s Increasing Punitiveness”; Garland, The Culture of Control.

97 Altier, “Criminal or Terrorist.”

98 Binnal and Petersen, “They’re Just Different”; Cumberland and Zamble, “General and Specific Measures”; Levy, Cohen-Louck, and Herzog, “Predicting Support for Community Corrections.”

99 Ibid.

100 Altier, “Criminal or Terrorist.”

101 Costelloe, Stenger, and Arazan, “Punitiveness and Perceptions of Criminality”; Johnson, “Racial Prejudice.”

102 Green, Staerkle, and Sears, “Symbolic Racism”; Johnson, “Racial Prejudice.”

103 Metcalfe and Pickett, “Public Fear of Protesters,” 79.

104 Matthew J. Dolliver and Erin M. Kearns, “Is It Terrorism?: Public Perceptions, Media, and Labeling the Las Vegas Shooting,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 45, no. 1 (2022): 1–19.

105 Edwards and Arnon, “Violence on Many Sides”; Giersch, “Punishing Campus Protesters Based on Ideology”; Hennessey, Feinberg, and Wilson, “How Political Partisanship”; Kearns and Young, Tortured Logic.

106 Edwards and Arnon, “Violence on Many Sides.”

107 Giersch, “Punishing Campus Protesters Based on Ideology.”

108 Butler, Race and Redemption.

109 L. Arpan, K. Baker, Y. Lee, T. Jung, L. Lorusso, and J. Smith, “News Coverage of Social Protests and the Effects of Photographs and Prior Attitudes,” Mass Communication & Society 9, no. 1 (2006): 1–20; A. J. Baranauskas, “News Media and Public Attitudes toward the Protests of 2020: An Examination of the Mediating Role of Perceived Protester Violence,” Criminology & Public Policy 21 (2022): 107–23; L. M. Herrington, “Conservative Christian Persecution Discourse and Support for Political Violence: Experimental Evidence from the United States,” Religions 12, no. 829 (2021): 1–36.

110 S. Ansolabehere and D. Rivers, “Cooperative Survey Research,” Annual Review of Political Science 16 (2013): 307–29; Butler, Race and Redemption.

Additional information

Funding

This project was partially supported by the University of Nebraska–Omaha’s College of Public Affairs and Community Service Seed Grant Funding.