Intergroup images mediate the relationships between government abuse, sociopolitical orientations, and political action

ABSTRACT

What factors impact how people mobilize against state human rights abuses? Drawing on Image Theory, we examine how perceptions of an out-group, government abuse, and sociopolitical orientations impact political action. Using an online survey-embedded experiment with a sample of 2,932 U.S. adults, we manipulated two factors: (1) the level of government abuse and (2) the risk of punishment for taking action against the state, while also including social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) as covariates. Participants indicated their propensity to engage in and justify both protest and violence. Participants rated the out-group as oppressive and evil. State abuse of human rights was associated with more oppressive and evil out-group images. Oppressive out-group images increased protest engagement and justification, whereas evil out-group images increased violence engagement and justification. Abuse increased all forms of action and justifications for them. Oppressive and evil images mediated many of the relationships between abuse, SDO, and RWA on one hand and political action on the other.

KEYWORDS:

• Images
• political action
• human rights abuse
• sociopolitical orientation
• experiment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Alexander et al. (2005) also note that, while perceptions of power and status are often correlated, a group may be perceived as having high power but low status or high status but low power.

2. In the low government abuse condition, the participant’s minority ethnic group was subjected to abuse some years ago and the group current hold fewer grievances stemming from abuse. We have opted for a low government abuse rather than a no government abuse condition here and in our related studies. In pilot testing, we found that participants were confused by a no government abuse condition since there would be no reason for contentious political action if there were not some grievances held by the participant’s group.

3. While the items measuring Oppressive and Evil were derived from image theory, we also ran Confirmatory Factor Analysis with these two-factors versus a single-factor to ensure that the two-factor model is a better fit. Both a chi-square difference test (X²(1, N=2,932)=112.88, p<0.001) and comparison of the Akaike Information Criterion confirm that the two-factor model is a better fit.

4. As a robustness check, we also estimated the models in Tables 3–Table 5 with a binary indicator for whether or not the participant was a racial/ethnic minority themselves. Racial/ethnic minority participants are more likely to view the government as both oppressive and evil, and see violence as more justified. This variable does not have a significant relationship with any of the other outcome variables and inclusion of this variable in any of the models does not impact the results.

5. The interactions involving the sociopolitical variables (SDO and RWA) and the treatment conditions (abuse and risk) were largely not significant. Thus, we do not report them in text.

6. None of the interactions involving the sociopolitical variables (SDO and RWA) and the treatment conditions (abuse and risk) were significant. Thus, we do not report them in text.

7. Insofar as SDO and RWA create a predisposition to accept the position of a dominant majority group, these sociopolitical orientations may weaken the effects of abuse on justification of and willingness to engage in political action. To examine this, we conducted exploratory analyses to test whether there is mediated moderation – for example, is the interaction between SDO and abuse mediated by image of an out-group to explain the dependent variables. Results do not support this explanation.

8. Since the interaction between abuse and risk did not have a significant relationship with either of the proposed mediators or any of the outcomes, we have not included this interaction in our mediation analyses.

9. We also estimated mediation effects with using bootstrapping with case resampling. The results were fundamentally the same and thus are not reported in text.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the United States Department of Homeland Security through the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), grant number N00140510629 awarded to Lemieux and Asal. However, any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect views of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Notes on contributors

Erin M. Kearns

Erin M. Kearns is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama. Starting in August 2021, she will join the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center of Excellence at the University of Nebraska Omaha.Her primary research seeks to understand the relationship among terrorism, media, law enforcement, and the public. Her work has been funded through a number of sources, including the National Consortium for the Study of and Responses to Terrorism (START) and featured on numerous media outlets including CNN, The Economist, NPR, theWashington Post, and Vox.

Christopher Federico

Christopher M. Federico is Professor of Political Science and Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He currently serves as Director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for the Study of Political Psychology and as a Vice President of the International Society of Political Psychology. A political psychologist with interests that cross disciplinary boundaries, his research focuses in particular on the nature of ideology and belief systems, the psychological foundations of political preferences, and intergroup attitudes.

Victor Asal

Victor Asal is Director of the Center for Policy Research and a Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. His research focuses on violent nonstate actors (VNSAs), pedagogy and political discrimination related to ethnicity, gender and sexuality.  He and R. Karl Rethemeyer created the Big Allied and Dangerous Data (BAAD) effort collecting yearly data on VNSAs. Asal has been involved in research projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, The Department of Homeland Security, The National Science Foundation, and  The Office of Naval Research.

James Igoe Walsh

James Walsh is Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He holds a PhD in International Relations from American University. His research interests include natural resources and conflict, human rights violations, and forced displacement and return. His book, Combat Drones and Support for the Use of Force, is available from The University of Michigan Press. His work has been supported by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Minerva Research Initiative and Army Research Office.

Allison E. Betus

Allison E. Betus is a Craigie International Security Scholar and doctoral candidate at Georgia State University’s department of Communication. Prior to this, she earned an MA in psychology from The New School for Social Research. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to behavioral science, she examines perceptions of terrorism, media coverage of terrorism, bias, and intergroup conflict.

Anthony F. Lemieux

Anthony F. Lemieux is founding co-director of the Atlanta Global Studies Center, and professor of Communication at Georgia State University. He is principal investigator of the U.S. Department of Defense Minerva Initiative supported interdisciplinary, multi-institution, research program on Mobilizing Media which analyzes propaganda outputs of terrorist groups including magazines, music, images, texts, and videos. In addition, he is co-PI on a U.S. Department of Education supported National Resource Center and FLAS program in collaboration with colleagues at Georgia Tech.