Thanks, James!

A more severe provocation increases violence justification, but it does NOT shrink the partisan double standard.

Study is forthcoming in Public Opinion Quarterly, coauthored w/ @lilymasonphd.bsky.social, Cornelius Cappelen and Tor Midtbø.

Both sides apply clear double standards when judging identical acts of violence. Strong partisans are nearly 3 times more likely to explicitly justify acts of partisan political violence against the opposition (27–30%) than against their own party (10–11%).

Using a survey experiment with a realistic political rally scenario, we manipulate who commits violence (inparty, outparty, no party) and how severe the provocation is. Across conditions, partisan identity acts as a powerful perceptual filter.

Results: Recrimination significantly heightens perceptions of conflict, while conciliation has no impact. These findings contribute to understanding the boundary conditions of elite influence, suggesting that for political leaders, it is easier to fan the flames of conflict than to put out the fire.

We run a survey experiment in the Norwegian Citizen Panel (N=2,287) using real elite reactions to the 22 July 2011 terrorist attacks: mutual recrimination vs. cross-partisan conciliatory appeals vs. a control. Then we ask whether people see July 22 as contributing to political conflict

On average across traits, the three methods produced remarkably similar estimates of ~30%. Most (~85%) of this variance could already be estimated by common variant GWAS run on the same samples. Strikingly, classical twin estimates for these traits were ~2x higher!

An important rule of politics is that all formal institutions—all laws, all procedural rules, all constitutions—are just informal institutions in disguise. The minute they are not actually backed by behavior of some kind, they cease to exist. Formalization only sets a higher bar for ignoring them.

Twitter/X is a story on its own:

🔴 While users have become more Republican
💥 POSTING has completely transformed: it has moved nearly ❗50 percentage points❗ from Democrat-dominated to slightly Republican-leaning.

Most young men in Britain, despite popular commentary, are *not* flocking to Reform UK.

Just under 1/3 women would vote for Reform
Just over 1/3 would vote for Reform.

We *cannot* reject the null of gender gap homogeneity across cohorts.

Posting is correlated with affective polarization:
😡 The most partisan users — those who love their party and despise the other — are more likely to post about politics
🥊 The result? A loud angry minority dominates online politics, which itself can drive polarization (see doi.org/10.1073/pnas...)