How to Measure Public Support for Political Violence

Abstract With low but rising levels of violent political threats and violent acts by civilians in the United States, researchers increasingly want to measure violent public views—fearing the erosion of collective norms inhibiting violence while also regarding individual attitudes as a risk for rare violent action and more common forms of aggressive political behavior. But how should violent views be measured and interpreted? Drawing on our decade-plus researching these views with several dozen questions and a catalogue of related work by others, we provide a practical measurement guide for assessing violent political views with extensive new observational and experimental illustrations that also make important methodological and substantive contributions to the field. We provide considerations for choosing good measure(s): empirically informed measurement principles, general and specific question evaluations, a deep dive into question design, reliability, and validity, and more. The Supplementary Material also catalogues a century of violence questions and more published works.