Sam Fuller (APRW)

Speaker & Title

Sam Fuller, "Negative Competitive Partisanship: The How and Why of Partisan Support for Antidemocratic Actions and Political Violence"

Abstract

Why do partisans hold antidemocratic attitudes and support political violence? What are the psychological mechanisms that fuel and shape these attitudes? Here I present my research on how positive and negative partisan identity combined with the zero-sum, competitive nature of current politics structures partisans' extreme attitudes. Specifically, I focus on three projects. The first reanalyzes existing data across time and space on the predictors of support for political violence using an agnostic, exploratory machine learning process. Overlooked by previous literature, we find that young adults are significantly more likely than their older counterparts to support political violence and are affected differently by experimental treatments aimed at manipulating support for political violence. The second focuses on how partisans' negative social identity towards the out-party—but not partisan animosity—predicts antidemocratic attitudes and support for political violence. Finally, the third project shows how partisan competition—and individuals' own attitudes toward fairness and competition—influences support for partisan gerrymandering. Together, these projects illustrate how (negative) competitive partisanship in conjunction with psychological processes lead to support for antidemocratic actions and political violence.