Democrats overestimate Republicans’ support for political violence more than vice versa

Concerns about political violence have intensified across the United States. We conducted two pre-registered studies (N=408 and N=906) examining how Americans perceive support for political violence within their own and opposing political parties. In Study 1, Democrats estimated that 29.60% of Republicans report supporting political violence, but only 1.83% of Republicans actually report support, representing a 1,517% overestimation. In contrast, Republicans estimated that 19.48% of Democrats report supporting political violence, but only 3.54 % of Democrats actually did—a 450% overestimation. Thus, while both groups overestimated the prevalence of outparty members’ political violence support, we find that Democrats are significantly more pessimistic. In Study 2, we replicated this finding with a larger, nationally representative sample. We also explored the limits of this asymmetry and found no evidence of asymmetric perceptions for non-political crime support or ingroup members’ political violence support, suggesting a unique asymmetry in perceived outgroup political violence support.