Partisanship and violent intentions in the United States

We have witnessed a drastic increase in partisanship in the United States in the past decades. This increase has sparked concern about the risk that the effects may not be as benign as the positive political engagement and activism behaviors that the political science literature has traditionally investigated. This paper explicitly targets the risk that increased partisan identities may lead to stronger intentions to engage in violent political behaviors. By integrating insights form the literature on radicalization to political violence, and using three original, population representative cross-sectional and experimental studies of adult Americans (total n=3,797), this paper shows that stronger partisan identities drive stronger intentions to engage in political violence, but that this effect holds for partisans with a callous, manipulative personality structure only.