Curbing Citizen Support for Violence Against Politicians

Rising political violence and affective polarization pose a pressing threat to democratic stability, challenging classic theories of state formation that emphasize the state’s monopoly on legitimate force. Reducing citizen support for violence against politicians is therefore crucial to safeguard democratic institutions. To examine how this can be addressed, we use two pre-registered survey experiments in France and Belgium that manipulate politician characteristics (gender, age, and party) and violence’s severity. We find that extreme violent attitudes remain rare, although support for verbal abuse online is substantial. Importantly, our results reveal that such attitudes are largely unrelated to affective polarization. We then show that simple interventions (humanizing politicians through perspective-taking or stressing the importance of ideological pluralism for democracy) reduce support for political violence. These findings suggest that protecting institutions requires addressing underlying societal predispositions by promoting empathy and reinforcing norms of political tolerance.