Compare methods
Review your selected methods side by side; rows that differ are highlighted.
| Support for Political Violence Measure× | Democratic Norms Support Measurement× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field | Political Psychology | Political Psychology |
| Family≠ | Latent structure | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin≠ | 2022 | 2020 |
| Originator≠ | Nathan Kalmoe & Lilliana Mason | Matthew Graham & Milan Svolik; Christopher Claassen |
| Type≠ | Attitude scale for endorsement of partisan violence | Experimental and survey measurement of democratic commitment |
| Seminal source≠ | Kalmoe, N. P., & Mason, L. (2022). Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy. University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 9780226820286 | Graham, M. H., & Svolik, M. W. (2020). Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States. American Political Science Review, 114(2), 392-409. DOI ↗ |
| Aliases | Lethal Partisanship Scale, Support for Partisan Violence Battery, Kalmoe-Mason Political Violence Items, Radical Partisanship Measure | Support for Democracy Tradeoff Experiment, Democratic Backsliding Tolerance Measure, Graham-Svolik Democratic Norms Design, Commitment to Democratic Principles Measure |
| Related | 3 | 3 |
| Summary≠ | This measure assesses citizens' willingness to endorse violence against political opponents, a key indicator of democratic fragility. Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason's research, synthesized in Radical American Partisanship (2022), maps a continuum of violent partisan hostility from wishing harm on the other side to endorsing lethal attacks, using representative surveys and embedded behavioral experiments. Because such attitudes are rare and the items are extreme, the measure has prompted vigorous methodological debate, exemplified by Westwood and colleagues' demonstration that inattentive responding and item design can substantially inflate apparent support, making bias correction central to credible estimates. | This approach measures how committed ordinary citizens are to democratic norms by observing the price they are willing to pay to uphold them. Rather than asking abstractly whether people value democracy, Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik's 2020 candidate-choice design confronts voters with a co-partisan candidate who violates a democratic principle and estimates how much electoral support that violation costs. Their finding that most Americans will tolerate undemocratic behavior by their own side when partisanship and policy stakes are high reframed the study of democratic backsliding around revealed, not professed, commitment. Christopher Claassen's parallel work links aggregate diffuse support for democracy to whether democracies survive. |
| ScholarGateDataset ↗ |
|
|