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Abstract
The recent concurrence of violent political rhetoric and violence against political targets in the U.S. and abroad has raised public concern about the effects of language on citizens. Building from theoretical foundations in aggression research, I fielded two nationally representative survey experiments and a third local experiment preceding the 2010 midterm elections to investigate support for violence against political authority. Subjects were randomly assigned to view one of two forms of the same political advertisements. Across all three experiments, mild violent metaphors multiply support for political violence among aggressive citizens, especially among young adults. Aggressive personality traits also predict support for political violence in both national studies. This work identifies dynamic roots of violent political orientations and reveals for the first time surprising interactions between this elite discourse and personality traits in citizens.
Acknowledgments
This project was supported by the Gerald R. Ford Fellowship and the Marsh Research Fellowship at the University of Michigan. Data for Study 2 were collected by Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (NSF Grant 0818839), Jeremy Freese and Penny Visser, principal investigators. The author thanks Don Kinder, Ted Brader, Nancy Burns, Nick Valentino, Brad Bushman, Charles Doriean, Josh Gubler, Brendan Nyhan, the anonymous reviewers, and the participants of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Politics and Policy at the University of Michigan for their comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this work was presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.
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Notes on contributors
Nathan P. Kalmoe
Nathan P. Kalmoe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Monmouth College.