Abstract
The January 6, 2021 Insurrection at the United States Capitol has renewed concerns that American citizens are becoming more tolerant of political violence, a phenomenon that fits within broader fears that partisan-induced motivated reasoning is driving democratic backsliding within the U.S. and across the Western world. Given the rural origins of many right-wing militia groups, and the widespread set of grievances circulating in rural America, questions and fear abound as to whether rural America is more supportive of political violence. In this paper, we investigate whether there is a substantial geographic component to support for violence against the state or ordinary citizens. Drawing on original survey data collected in the fall of 2021, we present two studies that explore the association between rural geography, rural resentment, and support for political violence. We find that, contrary to popular belief, rural Americans may actually be less likely to support political violence than their non-rural counterparts. Importantly, however, we find that some rural individuals – namely those who harbor higher levels of rural resentment – are more likely, on average, to support violence against the state. The same result is not replicated when looking at support for violence against ordinary citizens. These results provide important insight into the relationship between geographic attitudes and political violence and have noteworthy implications for American national security in our contemporary age of hyper-polarization.
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Notes
Phoebe Wall Howard, “Michigan law enforcement on alert in response to ‘plan to target and kill police’,” Detroit Free Press, Oct. 12, 2020.
Erin McLaughlin, Susan Kroll and David K. Li, “Far-right Patriot Prayer group says fatal shooting victim in Portland was a supporter,” NBC News, Aug. 31, 2020.
Lauren Leatherby, Arielle Ray, Anjali Singhvi, Christiaan Triebert, Derek Watkins and Haley Willis, “How a Presidential Rally Turned Into a Capitol Rampage,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 2021.
For an example of this stereotype-driven narrative, see Joseph P. Williams, “Penthouse Populist: Why the rural poor love Donald Trump,” U.S. News & World Report, Sep. 22, 2016.
Will Jennings, “Educated Urban Voters are Key to Success in Deeply Divided America,” The Guardian, Nov. 8, 2020.
For example, Jessica DuLong “The Capitol Riot and the danger of depicting rural America as only right wing,” CNN, Feb. 17, 2021. See also Christopher Ketcham “Capitol attackers have long threatened violence in the rural American west,” Jan. 9, 2021, and Nate Hegyi “Rural Westerners are Saddened but not Surprised by Insurrection at U.S. Capitol,” Boise State Public Radio News, Jan. 8, 2021.
Replication materials: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Z8HZL7.
A similar term that some use is negative partisanship, but we avoid using that term here due to a lack of conceptual clarity in the literature surrounding this term – see Lelkes (2021).
In other words, the descent to authoritarianism from democracy doesn’t typically happen all at once. Rather, democratic institutions and the rules and norms that uphold them are often sporadically chipped away at over time. For example, at the time of this writing in April 2023, there have been many recent attempts, whether intentioned for this purpose or not, to erode democracy, both within the United States and abroad. For example, Missouri Senate Republicans passed legislation to make amending the constitution more difficult. The bill requires that at least 57% of voters favor amendments advanced via ballot initiative, or, alternatively, at least 50% of voters statewide and a majority within five of the state’s eight congressional districts. In effect, since the Missouri legislature has gerrymandered congressional districts to favor Republicans, the bill allows Republicans to alter the constitution with a bare majority of the statewide votes while requiring their Democratic opponents attain 57% of the statewide vote since it is highly unlikely Democratic sponsored amendments could obtain 50% support in five of the state’s eight congressional districts. Deliberately making it harder for one party to pursue constitutional reform is, quite plainly, anti-democratic (for a more complete overview, see: Kacen Bayless, “Ahead of possible abortion fight, MO Senate passes plan to make it harder to change constitution,” The Kansas City Star, April 27, 2023). However, despite this amendment, other democratic procedures within the state will, until changed via amendment or other means, remain. This is an example of how democratic backsliding is incremental. For an example outside the United States, the case of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempting to diminish judicial independence is another strong contemporary case – see: Raffi Berg, “Israel judicial reform: Why is there a crisis?,” BBC News, April 28, 2023.
A poll conducted by researchers at Quinnipiac University in the fall of 2021 found that 66% of Republican respondents declined to characterize the events of January 6th, 2021 as an attack upon the government. The same poll also found that strong majorities of Republicans reported that Donald Trump bore little responsibility for these events and denied that the former president undermined democracy. The poll was accessed at the following link on Dec. 26th, 2021: https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3825.
Throughout the 1990’s, for instance, violent crime rates were 75% higher in urban areas than in rural areas: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/ascii/usrv98.txt. This has also been the case throughout virtually the entirely of the 21st century: https://www.ncjrs.gov/ovc_archives/ncvrw/2017/images/en_artwork/Fact_Sheets/2017NCVRW_UrbanRural_508.pdf. In recent years, rural violent crime rates have increased significantly, but still remain lower than urban areas: https://thecrimereport.org/2018/05/14/rural-violent-crime-rate-rises-above-u-s-average/. An exception to this general rule concerns domestic violence, which have been linked both to attitudinal and contextual factors more prevalent in rural areas (Ellis, 2015).
We acknowledge the possibility that rural people, many of whom are Trump supporters, may not see the events of the January 6th Insurrection as an example of political violence. Our data are unable to speak to this possibility, however.
Anya Slepyan, Tim Marema, and Claire Carlson, “January 6 Arrestees Aren’t More Likely to Be from Rural Areas,” The Daily Yonder, Jan. 5, 2022.
We created two sets of post-stratification weights using the “ipfweight” function in Stata 17. In the primary weighting scheme, which is used for all statistics reported in the main manuscript, we weighted rural residency, gender, household income, education, race, and ideology according to weighted 2020 ANES targets. We used the ANES because we are interested in respondents’ self-reported residency along the urban-rural spectrum, and the ANES is widely understood as a representative sample and one that happens to also measure subjective geographic residency in a sufficiently similar way to our approach (see the 2020 ANES codebook). The second set of weights are the same as the first set but instead we weight urban-rural residency to the 2020 U.S. Census’s “objective” measure rather than to the ANES’s subjective one. Results are overwhelmingly robust regardless of whether weights are used (or which ones) and the few divergences that do arise are noted in the results section. Unweighted bivariate and multivariate results are presented in Tables A11 and A12, whereas those using the alternative weighting scheme are presented in Tables A13 and A14.
It is unclear why self-identifying rural respondents posted substantially higher rates of attentiveness. However, this highlights the problem articulated by others (e.g., Ternovski and Orr, 2022) that selecting on attentiveness inadvertently selects on other attributes, including class. We see this as further reason to present estimates within both the full sample and attentive subsample.
Scholarly debate over the definition of political violence results in differing estimates of support for political violence in the American population (Westwood et al., 2021). In this paper, we concern ourselves with explicit support for political violence. Explicit support is outright approval and acceptance of political violence. Given the lessons of Westwood et al., (the most central of which for this measurement discussion being that whether someone will support or reject any given specific instance of political violence will largely depend on the details of that case, including questions of who, what, and where), we acknowledge that though we do specify in our questions whether we are asking about political violence directed at the state vs. that directed toward ordinary citizens, these relatively abstract opinions are worth studying even if they might inflate estimates of support for political violence vs. what we would find if we were asking about more specific examples of political violence in proper context. In particular, while we are careful not to dwell on the percentages of people who endorse such violence (though we do mention them briefly in the body of manuscript), we believe that it is worth understanding the geographical correlates of support for political violence at the broad level, as presumably those who endorse the broad principles of political violence will also be those who are most likely to support specific instances of political violence situated in their full and proper context. In other words, while we acknowledge the potential drawbacks of our approach – as helpfully brought to light in Westwood et al., 2021 – both in this footnote and in this paper’s conclusion, we believe that there is considerable value in understanding broad orientations toward political violence.
This question was adapted directly from a poll fielded by Morning Consult in late January of 2021: https://morningconsult.com/form/tracking-voter-trust-in-elections/. Again, we acknowledge that our questions are rather broad and lack specificity (see the footnote immediately prior to this one). Both Westwood et al. (2021) and Kalmoe and Mason (2022)\ show that estimates of violence support varies depending on which type or class of violence that is committed and why. Yet, at this nascent stage in the American public opinion on political violence literature, we echo Kalmoe and Mason’s (2022) point that ascertaining a greater understanding of the correlates of broad attitudes toward political violence constitute important first steps in advancing our collective knowledge of this topic.
The percentage reported here of respondents who responded “definitely yes” that they believe political violence is sometimes justified against the government is higher than that found in recent Morning Consult polls (e.g., https://morningconsult.com/form/tracking-voter-trust-in-elections/ ). However, once we remove assumed inattentive respondents, our numbers mirror those found in such polls.
It should be noted, though, that subjective rural residency is not the same as rural identity. Rural identity (e.g., Munis, 2020; Lunz Trujillo, 2021) involves an additional affective component and is core to the personal self-understanding of those who embody it. However, according to a new paper (Lunz Trujillo, 2022), the vast majority of self-reporting rural residents express rural identity in the social-identity theory sense (this includes both a majority of those who report having been born and raised in rural areas and a majority of those who were born and raised in non-rural areas but who self-report as living in a rural area now). This high, but not perfectly 1:1, correlation between rural residency and rural identity further justifies our approach of measuring to pairing a subjective residency measure with rural resentment. For the purposes of this paper, which is comparing political violence attitudes between self-understood rural and non-rural communities, we are interested in the relationship of rural resentment and political violence only for those who see themselves as rural residents (Lunz Trujillo, 2022 notes that a non-trivial number of non-rural residents harbor high rural identity, including those who report never having lived in a rural area, which makes measuring rural identity per se a non-ideal approach for this paper’s specific aims).
Our measure is a measure of how “lazy” respondents rate black Americans, a common stereotype. It’s important to include racial prejudice as a confounder, since it has been found to be related to rural resentment (Nelsen & Petsko, 2021) and many contemporary instances of right-wing political violence in America have racial components (e.g., Charlottesville Unite the Right, 2017).
Results diverge in the unweighted sample (model 3, Table A11) and when using ordered logistic regression (model 3, Table A5), but are upheld using the alternative weighting scheme (model 3, Table A13). Altogether, the results are mixed, and no firm conclusion can be drawn regarding whether rural residency is associated with lower levels of support for violence against the state, though we can confidently say that it is not associated with higher levels of support.
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Acknowledgements
For feedback and encouragement throughout the course of writing and refining the paper, we thank Katherine Cramer, Nicole Huffman, Nathan Kalmoe, Anthony Sparacino, Steven Sylvester, Jay DeSart, Jordan Carr Peterson, Joe Uscinski, members of the Data and Politics Lab at Utah State University, Geoffrey Layman, Chris Karpowitz, Jessica Preece, and the three anonymous reviewers at Political Behavior.
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The authors have no conflicts of interest in publishing this work. This research was funded by the UVU Dept. of History & Political Science and approved by the UVU IRB (#871). Data and other replication materials are available: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Z8HZL7.
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Munis, B., Memovic, A. & Christley, O. Of Rural Resentment and Storming Capitols: An Investigation of the Geographic Contours of Support for Political Violence in the United States. Polit Behav (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09895-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09895-6