Understanding the Gap Between Public & Scholarly Concepts of Political Violence

• In Event: Attitudes toward Political Protest and Violence

Abstract

How do ordinary citizens define and understand contested concepts of political violence employed by scholars of the subject? To what extent do popular understandings of types of political violence correspond to scholarly definitions? We propose to address this question through a series of survey experiments focused on public understandings of terms that political scientists used to describe the violent storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. This paper is an important first step in bridging the divide between scholarly and media definitions and the public’s understanding of political violence and the consequences of word choice on public opinion surrounding political violence.

There has been intense debate among scholars of political violence over how to classify the violent storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. Some political scientists have characterized this event as an attempted coup (Musgrave 2021), autogolpe (Call 2021), or part of an attempted presidential coup (Center for Systemic Peace 2021); others, however, argued against classifying January 6 as a coup attempt, as the military was not directly involved (De Bruin 2021), and instead termed it an insurrection (Singh 2021). Still others warned that the events of January 6 presaged a new phase of domestic terrorism in the United States (Byman 2021). Similar debates occurred in the popular discourse, as elected officials, journalists, and pundits used these and other terms, including protest, riot, and attack, inter alia, to characterize January 6; in these debates, terminology often followed partisanship, with Democratic members of Congress more likely to use insurrection, terrorism, attack, mob, and riot to characterize the day’s events, and Republicans more likely to describe January 6 as a protest and to emphasize support for law enforcement (Pew Research Center 2021). Public opinion polling also indicated partisan differences in terminology used to describe the events of January 6, with Biden voters more likely to classify participants as terrorists and criminals and Trump voters using terms such as protesters and patriots (Costa and Schaffner 2021).

The debates over how to classify the events of January 6 demonstrate the highly contested nature of concepts of political violence, notwithstanding efforts by scholars to develop and apply “objective” definitions. These debates also illustrate potential gaps between how scholars of political violence define and use relevant concepts, media portrayal of the events as they take place, and public understandings of associated terms. The primary purpose of our proposed paper is to identify the extent of these gaps and understand how word choice influences public opinion. To understand how the public understands terms used to describe acts of political violence, we conduct a survey experiment. In this experiment, we randomize descriptions of violent political events corresponding to scholarly definitions of various terms in the political violence literature, including coup, autogolpe, and terrorism, inter alia; we then ask respondents to classify the events based on the description to determine whether and how public understandings of concepts of political violence correspond to scholarly definitions and how these definitions influence how the public thinks about acts of political violence.

Authors

• M.P. Broache, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Melissa Baker, University of Toronto

• Peter Carey, University of California, Merced