Pathways to violence: do uncertainty and dark world perceptions increase intentions to engage in political violence?

ABSTRACT

This paper develops and experimentally tests two pathways to intentions to engage in political violence. By distinguishing between self-directed and other-directed explanations of political violence, it presents the two pathways of uncertainty and dark world perceptions. In the first pathway, self-related uncertainty is projected onto hostile outgroups, motivating politically violent intentions. In the second pathway, perceptions of the world as chaotic, dark and dangerous make political violence seem necessary by making deliberation seem less likely. In two large, population representative, survey-experimental studies in the United States and Denmark (total n = 2889), the paper conjointly tests these two pathways. The results show causal support for the uncertainty pathway in predicting intentions to engage in violence rather than activism, but show less support for the dark world pathway. Finally, the paper recommends uncertainty-reducing interventions to combat the risk of increased political violence in society.

KEYWORDS:

• Political violence
• conflict
• uncertainty
• dark world perceptions
• experiment

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfond.

Notes on contributors

Oluf Gøtzsche-Astrup

Oluf Gøtzsche-Astrup, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark.