Sam Fuller, "Something's Wrong With the Kids: The ubiquitous relationship between youth and support for political violence"
Concerns about support for political violence and its correlates are widespread in both academic research and in the cultural zeitgeist. As such, there is a growing strand of literature attempting to understand the extent to which these attitudes are widespread and how they relate to other political attitudes and identities, like partisanship. Understandably, much of this research has focused on these relationships, rather than other demographics, especially age. Overlooked by the previous literature, we find, across numerous American and cross-national surveys, a large and robust relationship between age and support for political violence. Simply put, younger respondents are dramatically more likely to support political violence than their older counterparts. This relationship holds across a diverse set of measurement strategies, including hypothetical and specific scenarios, and is robust to model specification: both machine learning and standard parametric models recover similar estimates. Based on the synthesis of these results and previous literature, we propose a unified theory of the correlates of support for political violence. Specifically, we propose three interrelated, but distinct factors: psychological characteristics, identity, and system attitudes. All three of these factors are 1) highly predictive of support for political violence, according to previous research; and 2) are highly correlated with youth. We argue that this theory explains the consistent relationship between age and support for political violence across both time and space.
The American Politics Research Workshop (Gov 3004) meets all academic year, Tuesdays, 12:00 - 2:00 PM, in CGIS K354. This workshop presents an opportunity for graduate students and Harvard faculty to present and receive feedback on their current research. The workshop highlights key theoretical and empirical findings from Harvard affiliates on topics related to American politics.
All interested Harvard affiliates are invited to attend.
LOCATION: CGIS Knafel room K354, or online via Zoom STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20241105T170000Z DTEND:20241105T190000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR