Support for Political Violence 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.