This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: What happens when political violence is presented as a justified response to threat or injustice coming from an out-group? A study by Ursula Daxecker, director at the Max Planck Institute for Politics and Social Science in Göttingen, and Neeraj Prasad of the University of Amsterdam, published in The Journal of Politics, finds that legitimizing violence can increase public approval of both violence and the parties involved in it.
Among BJP supporters, the effect went even further: when violence was portrayed as justified, they were less approving of a peaceful response by their own party. The conventional wisdom is that citizens in democracies oppose political violence. Although this holds for those targeted by violence, the authors show that this assumption may be incomplete.
When violence is portrayed as justified, supporters of the party involved may accept it and even punish their own party for a peaceful response. The researchers conducted a representative in-person survey of approximately 4,750 registered voters during the 2022 state legislative elections in Uttar Pradesh. With more than 200 million inhabitants, Uttar Pradesh is India's most populous state; as a country, it would be the fifth most populous democracy in the world.
Its state elections are widely seen as decisive for national politics. The survey took place after respondents had cast their votes but before the results were announced. This meant that the researchers did not interfere with the campaign or respondents' vote choice, and that responses were not influenced by knowledge of the election outcome.
In a vignette experiment embedded in the survey, respondents received different information about a real incident of vandalism at the residence of Salman Khurshid, a Muslim politician. The information given varied in two respects: whether the incident was legitimized as a response to Khurshid's criticism of Hindu organizations, and whether the BJP was described as participating in the violence or initiating a peaceful dialogue. The results show that information portraying violence as justified can increase approval of violence among Hindu respondents, but political affiliation made a strong difference.
When violence was presented as justified, Hindu supporters of the BJP approved more strongly of their party's participation in it and turned against a peaceful response. On a scale from minus 1 (strong disapproval) to plus 1 (strong approval), their approval of a peaceful dialogue fell from 0.35 to minus 0.14. Hindu voters who do not support the BJP responded in the opposite direction: their approval of a peaceful response rose from 0.36 to 0.53.
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