When push comes to shove: How Americans excuse and condemn political violence

What factors do Americans find most important when evaluating acts of political violence? Normatively, details regarding the violent act (e.g., the target and violence severity) should determine the punishment for political violence. However, recent work on polarization and identity suggests evaluations of political violence may depend on the perpetrator’s characteristics. In two pre-registered conjoint experiments, we vary both perpetrator characteristics and features of the violent act to discern the relative weight of act-centric and perpetrator-centric considerations. We find that even though the perpetrator’s characteristics (e.g., partisanship) do influence people’s punishment of political violence, the features of the act matter much more for citizen evaluations of political violence, on average. Though these findings can be interpreted as normatively negative given the perpetrator’s identities do influence punishment, the disproportionate effect of the violent act’s target and severity are normatively encouraging.