Americans who support political violence: 20% of the population, or more like 2%?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 27--UPDATED

These political scientists argue for the lower figure:

[S]elf-reported attitudes on political violence are biased upwards because of respondent disengagement and survey questions that allow multiple interpretations of political violence. Addressing question wording and respondent disengagement, we find that the median ofexisting estimates of support for partisan violence is nearly 8 times larger than the median of our estimates (18.5% versus 2.4%). Critically, we show the prior estimates overstate support for political violence because of random responding by disengaged respondents.

d    Of course, if the 2.4% are heavily armed, that could still result in a lot of civil unrest.

 

  u     UPDATE:  One of the political scientists critiqued in the above-linked article responds here.  (Thanks to Jonathan Surovell for the pointer.)

UD

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