In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Leann Mclaren, covers the new research letter by Gregory Eady, Frederik Hjorth, University of Copenhagen, and Peter Thisted Dinesen, University College London “Do Violent Protests Affect Expressions of Party Identity? Evidence from the Capitol Insurrection”.
With more than two years since the historic Capitol hill insurrection on January 6, 2021, numerous media sources have recounted how the event, which resulted in over 900 arrests and counting, had such a profound impact on Americans’ views of democracy, and awareness of the potential for violent protests among radical groups. As a result, many have contemplated what the consequences are for these rioters, and how exactly these types of protests matter in the court of public opinion.
Gregory Eady, Frederick Hjorth, and Peter Thisted Dinesen in their recent APSR article examine this phenomenon using unique behavioral data. More specifically, they examine the question of how the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol shaped expressed identification with the political parties in the US. Using rigorous statistical techniques on 117,000 Twitter users, they examine how the event caused differences in usage of partisan labels among Twitter users before and after the riot.
The authors’ motivation for this study lies in the mixed previous findings concerning the relationship between violent protests and public opinion. Some previous research by Omar Wasow found that under some circumstances, such as the 1960s protests led by Black Americans, violent protests led to support for political parties that countered the moment (the Republican party). Others, like Ryan Enos, Aaron Kaufman, and Melissa Sands, find the opposite, that some violent protests can lead to a liberal shift in support of the goals of the protest (in this case in response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots). The authors of the current study wanted to understand how contemporary violent protests affect public opinion in a context of rising levels of political polarization among Americans, and whether this extends beyond the local context of the event.
The authors conduct a series of statistical analyses on data of 117,000 Twitter users. They first collected data daily from the Twitter bios of over 3.4 million users, with location information for each user. They started collecting data roughly seven months prior to the actual January 6 event and continued to collect data for about two months afterward (June 1, 2020-March 15, 2021). They filtered out users who did not have active accounts, did not live in the US, and never reported a partisan label in their bio. In order to examine partisan labels, they used various techniques to identify terms associated with the Democratic or Republican party. In the analyses, they look at Twitter users’ bios within a 10-day window on each side of the January 6 riot.
“The results of the study point to the large impact violent protests can have on identification with political parties, specifically among supporters of the party associated with the event.” Their analyses show that the January 6 riot caused Republicans to greatly reduce their use of partisan labels in their Twitter bios. About 1 in 25 Republican users removed partisan labels within a week and a half of the insurrection. This shift appeared to last for quite some time, as only 6% of Republican users who removed their labels added them back two months after the event. The relatively strong and lasting effects are surprising given the high level and stability of partisanship in the United States, and from the fact that few Twitter users change their bios frequently.
The results of the study point to the large impact violent protests can have on identification with political parties, specifically among supporters of the party associated with the event. Moreover, they indicate that if sufficiently severe, political violence can deflect even strong partisans away from their party identity.
- Leann Mclaren is a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University where she studies American Politics, with a focus on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship recipient (NSF-GRFP) and an APSA Minority Fellowship Program recipient. Leann’s dissertation explores how Black immigrant candidates navigate identity in political campaigns. Her other projects include mapping Black political behavior generally, specifically in the realms of social movements, and political participation. Leann holds a B.A. from the University of Connecticut and was an APSA Ralph Bunche Summer Institute Scholar.
- Article details: EADY, GREGORY, FREDERIK HJORTH, and PETER THISTED DINESEN. 2022. “Do Violent Protests Affect Expressions of Party Identity? Evidence from the Capitol Insurrection.”, American Political Science Review, 1-7
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