Should activism be treated as an indicator of attitudes towards political violence?

Abstract

Multiple contemporary meta-analyses pointed out activism as one of the risk factors for engagement in political violence, which is in line with the early radicalization models. However, others pointed out that joining activist organizations could prevent individuals from conducting violent acts. This study attempted to empirically evaluate whether activism should be treated as a risk factor using a large international World Value Survey data set and controlling for support for family violence. The initial outcomes have confirmed that activists tend to hold more positive attitudes towards political violence than non-activists. However, this relationship lost practical significance when the support for family violence was included in the model, which was replicated across different political regimes and contexts. Although such results do not support the notion of activists exhibiting more positive attitudes towards political violence, they also do not imply that their attitudes towards political violence are more negative compared to non-activists. Therefore, without knowing more about the specific social issue and context in which it had developed, conclusions regarding one’s attitudes towards political violence based only on his or her history of activism seem to be negligibly more correct than random guessing.

KEYWORDS:

• activism
• political violence
• protest
• radicalism
• radicalization
• regime

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17467586.2023.2253445.

Data availability statement

Data analysed in this study are available at the WVS website: https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV7.jsp#:~:text=The%207th%20wave%20of%20the,be%20released%20in%20October%202022

Notes

1. Original items and coding are presented in Supplementary table 1.

2. https://www.systemicpeace.org/polityproject.html

3. https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV7.jsp

4. https://osf.io/v3ua4/?view_only=5de06ccf7b5f42fd97cb84be2c8db3fe Outputs of additional analyses are included in the output html, in which two separate samples were formed. In the first sample, participants willing to participate in activism were coded as 1, those unwilling were coded as 0, while the participants who already participated in activism were recoded as NA. The outcomes of such analyses were nearly identical to the outcomes presented in the Results section, implying that the two types of coding led to the same conclusions. These outcomes are omitted from the manuscript to avoid redundancy. In the second sample, participants willing to participate in activism were coded as NA, those unwilling were coded as 0, while the participants who already participated in activism were recoded as 1. However, Heywood cases (in our case, negative unexplained variance of observed and unobserved variables occurring in autocracies) prevented us from obtaining trustworthy estimates in MGSEM, while the analyses conducted on the pooled sample suggested a negligible relationship between past activism and support for political violence (β = .03). Similar findings can be observed in the context of willing vs. had participated analyses. Additionally, analyses with imputed data (using kNN imputation), and analyses where activism was conceptualized as a first-order factor of all twelve items are presented, which also robustly confirm the results presented in the Results section of this manuscript. Altogether, these analyses either show that there is no relationship between activism and support for political violence or that this relationship is severely undermined when support for family violence is taken into account.

5. https://www.un.org/en/hate-speech

6. https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the HRZZ [DOK-01-2018].