Support for Political Violence Measure
Also known as: Lethal Partisanship Scale, Support for Partisan Violence Battery, Kalmoe-Mason Political Violence Items, Radical Partisanship Measure
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.
Key highlights
- Captures a graded continuum of violent hostility rather than a single blunt indicator.
- Combines representative surveys with behavioral experiments to probe correlates.
- Connects to theories of aggression, dehumanization, and moral disengagement.
- Has spurred methodological advances in measuring rare, sensitive attitudes credibly.
Intuition
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
How it works
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
When to use it
Use this measure when studying political radicalization, democratic backsliding, or the consequences of affective polarization and dehumanization, and you need to gauge endorsement of partisan violence. It is appropriate in large representative samples where prevalence and its correlates are the question. It is essential, however, to pair it with rigorous attention checks, careful wording, and bias correction; without these the measure is unsuitable because it overstates support. It is also ill-suited for inferring actual behavioral risk at the individual level, since endorsing a hypothetical is far removed from acting, and for small samples where rare-event estimates are unstable.
Strengths & limitations
- Captures a graded continuum of violent hostility rather than a single blunt indicator.
- Combines representative surveys with behavioral experiments to probe correlates.
- Connects to theories of aggression, dehumanization, and moral disengagement.
- Has spurred methodological advances in measuring rare, sensitive attitudes credibly.
- Naive estimates are badly inflated by inattentive and non-serious responding.
- Endorsing hypothetical violence is far removed from actual behavior, limiting behavioral inference.
- Estimates are highly sensitive to question wording and response format.
- Rare-event prevalence is statistically unstable without large, careful samples.
Common pitfalls
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
Applications
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
Frequently asked
Why are estimates of support for political violence so contested?
Because the attitude is rare and the items are extreme, a large share of apparent endorsements come from respondents who are inattentive, interpret the questions abstractly, or are not answering seriously. Westwood and colleagues show that with attention checks, clearer wording, and behavioral anchors, headline figures fall sharply. The contest is therefore about measurement: Kalmoe and Mason map the construct and its correlates, while critics emphasize that naive prevalence numbers overstate genuine, action-relevant support.
Does endorsing violence on a survey mean someone will act violently?
No. Agreeing with a hypothetical statement is far removed from real behavior, which involves opportunity, cost, and intent that surveys do not capture. The measure is best understood as tapping attitudes and rhetoric that may signal a permissive climate, not individual behavioral risk. Researchers validate it against related dispositions like trait aggression and dehumanization, but they are careful not to read survey endorsement as a prediction that a given respondent will commit violence.
How should the continuum of violent hostility be reported?
Because the construct ranges from diffuse hostility to lethal endorsement, reporting only a continuous mean obscures how many respondents reach the dangerous extreme. Good practice reports prevalence at meaningful thresholds along the continuum, after bias correction, so readers can distinguish mild partisan animosity from genuine support for lethal violence. Kalmoe and Mason's framing of degrees of lethal partisanship is designed to make these distinctions explicit.
Sources
- 1.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
- 2.Westwood, S. J., Grimmer, J., Tyler, M., & Nall, C. (2022). Current Research Overstates American Support for Political Violence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(12), e2116870119.
You have read it. What now?
Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). Support for Political Violence Measure. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/political-psychology/support-for-political-violence-scale