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ABSTRACT
Recent surveys have shown that significant numbers of partisans in the United States harbor violent attitudes towards out-party politicians and out-party members. This finding has corresponded with the increased visibility of political fringe groups, such as Antifa on the political left and QAnon on the political right. Fringe groups such as these take ideologically extreme political positions and defy political norms, including prohibitions on political violence. Are partisan supporters of these fringe groups more likely to hold violent political attitudes? Using survey data from the Understanding America Study (UAS), we test whether Antifa supporters and QAnon supporters are more likely to report violent attitudes compared to non-fringe group supporters. We find supporters of both groups are more likely to wish harm towards out-party members, support violent protest, and support various forms of interpersonal violence towards out-party members. The results hold even when controlling for ideological extremity, personality, and affective partisanship.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplemental material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2024.2365764
Notes
1. Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, Lethal Mass Partisanship: Prevalence, Correlates, & Electoral Contingencies, 2019; Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
2. “Americans Increasingly Believe Violence is Justified if the Other Side Wins,” Politico, 2020, accessed November 1, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/01/political-violence-424157.
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4. Katie Benner, “The F.B.I. Warns that Some QAnon Believers Could Turn to Violence as Predictions Fail to Bear Fruit,” The New York Times (2021). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/us/politics/qanon-fbi-violence.html.
5. Adam Enders et al., “Who Supports QAnon? A Case Study in Political Extremism,” The Journal of Politics 84, no. 3 (2022); Heidi Schulze et al., “Far-Right Conspiracy Groups on Fringe Platforms: A Longitudinal Analysis of Radicalization Dynamics on Telegram,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28, no. 4 (2022).
6. This assessment is found in Sergiu Gherghina and Adam Fagan, “Fringe Political Parties or Political Parties at the Fringes? The Dynamics of Political Competition in Post-Communist Europe,” Party Politics 27, no. 1 (2021).
7. John George and Laird Wilcox, Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe: Political Extremism in America (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992).
8. Michael Barkun, “President Trump and the ‘Fringe’,” Terrorism and Political Violence 29, no. 3 (2017): 437.
9. Kalmoe and Mason, Lethal Mass Partisanship; Steven W. Webster, Adam N. Glynn, and Matthew P. Motta, Partisan Schadenfreude and the Demand for Candidate Cruelty, 2021; Kalmoe and Mason, Radical American Partisanship.
10. Frank J. Gonzalez and Alexandra McCoy, Who is it Okay to Punch? An Experimental Investigation of Support for Intolerance in the Form of Physical Violence, 2021.
11. Enders et al., “Who Supports QAnon?”
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15. Schulze et al., “Far-Right Conspiracy Groups on Fringe Platforms.”
16. Michael H. Becker, “Deciding to Support Violence: An Empirical Examination of Systematic Decision-Making, Activism, and Support for Political Violence,” Criminology & Criminal Justice 21, no. 5 (2021).
17. Sophia Moskalenko and Clark McCauley, “Measuring Political Mobilizaiton: The Distinction Between Activism and Radicalism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no. 2 (2009).
18. Larry Bartels and Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
19. Michael Billig and Henri Tajfel, “Social Categorization and Similarity in Intergroup Behavior,” European Journal of Social Psychology 3, no. 1 (1973); Henri Tajfel and John Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict,” in The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, edited by William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 1979).
20. Jennifer Oser, Jan E. Leighley, and Kenneth M. Winneg, “Participation, Online and Otherwise: What’s the Difference for Policy Preferences?” Social Science Quarterly 95, no. 5 (2014).
21. Stephen A. Jessee, “Partisan Bias, Political Information and Spatial Voting in the 2008 Presidential Election,” The Journal of Politics 72, no. 2 (2010).
22. Lilliana Mason, “‘I Disrespectfully Agree’: The Differential Effects of Partisan Sorting on Social and Issue Polarization,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 1 (2015).
23. Juliana Kim, “U.S. Capitol Rioter the ‘QAnon Shaman’ is Released Early from Federal Prison,” NPR (March 31, 2023). https://www.npr.org/2023/03/31/1167319814/qanon-shaman-jacob-chansley-capitol-riot-early-release-reentry.
24. Michael M. Grynbaum, Davey Alba, and Reid J. Epstein, “How Pro-Trump Forces Pushed a Lie About Antifa at the Capitol Riot,” The New York Times (March 1, 2021). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/us/politics/antifa-conspiracy-capitol-riot.html.
25. “Trump Privately Blamed ‘Antifa People’ for Storming U.S. Capitol—Axios,” Reuters, 2021. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump/trump-privately-blamed-antifa-people-for-storming-u-s-capitol-axios-idUSKBN29H0DR (accessed May 19, 2023).
26. Nigel Copsey and Samuel Merrill, “Violence and Restraint within Antifa,” Perspectives on Terrorism 14, no. 6 (2020): 125.
27. Stanislav Vysotsky, American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021), 5.
28. Ariel Koch, “Trends in Anti-Fascist and Anarchist Recruitment and Mobilization,” Journal for Deradicalization 14 (2018).
29. Copsey and Merrill, “Violence and Restraint within Antifa,” 125.
30. Gary LaFree, “Is Antifa a Terrorist Group?” Society 55 (2018): 249.
31. “Points of Unity,” 2022. https://torchantifa.org/points-of-unity/ (accessed January 13, 2022).
32. Nigel Copsey, “Militant Antifascism: An Alternative (Historical) Reading,” Society 55 (2018): 246.
33. See note 29 above.
34. “Antifa Clashes with Police and Journalists in Charlottesville and DC,” Vox, 2018. https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/8/12/17681986/antifa-leftist-violence-clashes-protests-charlottesville-dc-unite-the-right (accessed January 13, 2022).
35. Anne Speckhard and Molly Ellenberg, Why Branding Antifa a Terror Group is a Diversion (International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, 2020).
36. Adam Klein, “From Twitter to Charlottesville: Analyzing the Fighting Words Between the Alt-Right and Antifa,” International Journal of Communication 13 (2019); Meysam Alizadeh et al., “Psychology and Morality of Political Extremists: Evidence from Twitter Language Analysis of Alt-Right and Antifa,” EPJ Data Science 8, no. 17 (2019).
37. Stanislav Vysotsky, “The Influence of Threat on Tactical Choices of Militant Anti-Fascist Activists,” Interface 5, no. 2 (2013): 27778.
38. Copsey, “Militant Antifascism: An Alternative (Historical) Reading,” 127.
39. Ethan Zuckerman, “QAnon and the Emergence of the Unreal,” Journal of Design and Science 6 (2019).
40. Amanda Garry et al., “QAnon Conspiracy Theory: Examining its Evolution and Mechanisms of Radicalization,” Journal for Deradicalization 26 (2021).
41. Adrenochrome is oxidized adrenaline, popularized in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and falsely believed by conspiracy theorists to be a powerful intoxicant or to provide eternal youth. For a discussion and analysis of QAnon conspiracy theories and related violence see: Michael A. Jensen and Sheehan Kane, “QAnon-Inspired Violence in the United States: An Empirical Assessment of a Misunderstood Threat,” Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression 16, no. 1 (2021).
42. Garry et al., “QAnon Conspiracy Theory,” 198; Jensen and Kane, “QAnon-inspired violence in the United States.”
43. Garry et al., “QAnon Conspiracy Theory,” 214.
44. Gary Ackerman and Hayley Peterson, “Terrorism and Covid-19,” Terrorism Research Initiative 14, no. 3 (2020): 62.
45. Jensen and Kane, “QAnon-inspired violence in the United States,” 2.
46. Zuckerman, “QAnon and the Emergence of the Unreal.”
47. Stathis N. Kalyvas and Laia Balcells, “International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict,” American Political Science Review 104, no. 3 (2010); Charles J. M. Drake, “The Role of Ideology in Terrorists’ Target Selection,” Terrorism and Political Violence 10, no. 2 (1998).
48. Jensen and Kane, “QAnon-inspired violence in the United States.”
49. The UAS received all necessary ethics approvals from the University of Southern California Institutional Review Board (approval number: USC UP-14-00148). Panel members consented to participated in the panel via the completion of an online consent form.
50. USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, “UAS 318 Post Election Poll,” (2020). https://uasdata.usc.edu/index.php; USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, “UAS 331 End of Year Survey 2020,” (2021). https://uasdata.usc.edu/index.php.
51. Marco Angrisani, Arie Kapteyn, and Htay-Wah Saw, Sampling and weighting the Understanding America Study (Social Science Research Network, 2019).
52. There were no changes in respondent partisanship between UAS 318 (the survey collected immediately after the 2020 election) and UAS 331.
53. Kalmoe and Mason, Lethal Mass Partisanship.
54. UAS 318 also asked participants whether they had “posted online” about QAnon/Antifa or if they had “attended a rally” for QAnon/Antifa. Much lower numbers of participants reported engagement in either activity, indicating a clear distinction between support for these groups and membership/engagement.
55. USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, “UAS 318 Post Election Poll.”
56. Kalmoe and Mason, Lethal Mass Partisanship; Yuan Hsiao and Scott Radnitz, “Allies or Agitators? How Partisan Identity Shapes Public Opinion about Violent or Nonviolent Protests,” Political Communication 38, no. 4 (2021); Gonzalez and McCoy, Who is it Okay to Punch?
57. Nathan P. Kalmoe, “Fueling the Fire: Violent Metaphors, Trait Aggression, and Support for Political Violence,” Political Communication 31, no. 4 (2014); Enders et al., “Who Supports QAnon?”
58. Oliver P. John, Eileen M. Donahue, and Robert L. Kentle, “The Big Five Inventory—Versions4 and 54,” edited by University of California Institute of Personality and Social Research (Berkeley, CA, 1991); Oliver P. John and Sanjay Srivastava, “The Big Five trait Taxonomy: History, Measurement, and Theoretical Perspectives,” Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research 2 (1999).
59. USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, “UAS Comprehensive File,” (2021). https://uasdata.usc.edu/page/UAS+Comprehensive+Data+File.
60. also show results among those who completed both UAS 318 and UAS 331.
61. See note 11 above.
62. These participants were also excluded from the model that asked about violent protest, a question from UAS 318, since party identification was included as a control variable. We estimate this model including members of all parties and find the results are substantively the same (See online appendix).
63. We might therefore interpret these results as only applying to voters. Of the 349 Antifa supporters in our sample, only 299 of them voted. Of the 129 QAnon supporters in our sample, only 95 of them voted. While these numbers are higher than the general population, it still means we are eliminating a large portion of the sample through the use of this control. As such we estimate the results without this control variable. The results (See online appendix) are similar, although the significance of the effect of support for QAnon on support for violent protest decreases.
64. A small number of UAS participants are “unweighted” due to the specific batches they were recruited from. These participants were therefore not included in the weighted regression models. For more detail, see: Angrisani, Kapteyn, and Saw, Sampling and weighting the Understanding America Study.
65. All figures include 95 percent confidence intervals. These confidence intervals are large for fringe group supporters, given the relatively small number of respondents who support these groups.
66. We are unable to create a composite measure of support for violent protest since only one question on the topic was asked. A principal components factor analysis (available in the online appendix) demonstrates that the schadenfreude question items and violence question items correspond to two separate underlying factors. Frequency distributions of these variables are also available in the appendix.
67. Control variables excluded from the table for brevity.
68. Both Qanon and Antifa were targets of condemnation in House and Senate resolutions, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was an avowed supporter of Qanon. See: Congressional Record, SENATE RESOLUTION 279–CALLING FOR THE DESIGNATION OF ANTIFA AS A DOMESTIC TERRORIST ORGANIZATION, (2019); Congressional Record, CONDEMNING QANON AND REJECTING THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES IT PROMOTES, 172 (2020).
69. The propensity for insincere—or “expressive”—survey responses has been shown to be correlated with partisan affiliation even for questions with an objectively “correct” answer. See: John G. Bullock et al., “Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics,” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 10, no. 1 (2015); Omer Yair and Gregory A. Huber, “How Robust is Evidence of Partisan Perceptual Bias in Survey Responses? A New Approach for Studying Expressive Responding,” Political Opinion Quarterly 84, no. 2 (2020).
70. Frauke Kreuter, Stanley Presser, and Roger Tourangeau, “Social Desirability Bias in CATI, IVR, and Web Surveys: The Effects of Mode and Question Sensitivity,” Public Opinion Quarterly 72, no. 5 (2008).
71. For a comprehensive overview of survey methods designed to mitigate this threat, see: Stafanie Stantcheva, How to Run Surveys: A Guide to Creating Your Own Identifying Variation and Revealing the Invisible, 2022, 30527, NBER Working Paper Series.
72. See the online appendix. One limitation is that UAS 318 was fielded immediately after the election and prior to January 6. As such, we cannot rule out the possibility that some fringe group supporters attended rallies and protests after the election.
73. Speckhard and Ellenberg, Why Branding Antifa a Terror Group is a Diversion.
74. Garry et al., “QAnon Conspiracy Theory,” 182.
75. Jensen and Kane, “QAnon-Inspired Violence in the United States,” 13.
76. Garry et al., “QAnon Conspiracy Theory,” 186.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Evan W. Sandlin
Evan W. Sandlin is a political scientist at the Center for Economic and Social Research at the University of Southern California. His research concerns how public opinion on issues such as political violence, foreign policy, and public health are impacted by partisan political affiliation, identity, and ideology.
Marshall Garland
Marshall Garland is a research scientist at the Center for Economic and Social Research at the University of Southern California. He is also the co-director of the Center for Applied Research in Education.