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Ethno-nationalism and Right-Wing Extremist Violence in the United States, 2000 through 2018

By on March 20, 2023 in Articles

Susan Olzak

Sociological Science March 20, 2023
10.15195/v10.a6

Abstract

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Influential studies of right-wing extremist violence offer evidence that such violence is motivated by grievances intensified by a perceived loss in status or by economic dislocations. This article moves away from an emphasis on grievances by turning to theories of ethno-nationalism and group conflict. Ethno-nationalism is in part driven by attitudes of dominant groups favoring ethnic exclusion, whereas group threat theories explain that ethnic diversity increases the salience of ethnic boundaries and fuels a collective response to group threat. Such threats encourage violence to contain this threat and restore dominance. Exclusionary attitudes and support for expanded gun rights in America further legitimize a culture of ethno-nationalism that encourages violent acts. I test these arguments with data from the Pew Research Center, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Extremist Crime Database on right-wing violence. The state-level and county-level results support the claim that rising ethnic diversity raises the rate and volume of right-wing violence significantly. State-level results also find that rising memberships in the National Rifle Association increase the rate of right-wing violence significantly.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Susan Olzak: Stanford University
E-mail: olzak@stanford.edu

Acknowledgments: The author thanks Trent Steidley, Holly Hansen, and Stephen C. Nemeth for providing some of the data used in this study. The author is grateful to Bart Bonikowski, Mike Hannan, Doug McAdam, Rory McVeigh, Sarah A. Soule, Andy Walder, and Nella Van Dyke for providing helpful suggestions and criticisms on earlier drafts.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Olzak, Susan. 2023. “Ethno-nationalism and Right-Wing Extremist Violence in the United States, 2000 through 2018.” Sociological Science 10:197-226.
  • Received: August 17, 2022
  • Accepted: December 8, 2022
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Peter Bearman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v10.a6


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Political Structures and Political Mores: Varieties of Politics in Comparative Perspective

By on June 16, 2016 in Articles

Marion Fourcade, Evan Schofer

Sociological Science, June 16, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a19

Abstract
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We offer an integrated study of political participation, bridging the gap between the literatures on civic engagement and social movements. Historically evolved institutions and culture generate different configurations of the political domain, shaping the meaning and forms of political activity in different societies. The structuration of the polity along the dimensions of “stateness” and “corporateness” accounts for cross-national differences in the way individuals make sense of and engage in the political sphere. Forms of political participation that are usually treated as istinct are actually interlinked and co-vary across national configurations. In societies where interests are represented in a formalized manner through corporatist arrangements, political participation revolves primarily around membership in pre-established groups and concerted negotiation, rather than extra-institutional types of action. By contrast, in “statist” societies the centralization and concentration of sovereignty in the state makes it the focal point of claim-making, driving social actors to engage in “public” activities and marginalizing private and, especially, market-based political forms. We test these and other hypotheses using cross-national data on political participation from the World Values Survey.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Marion Fourcade: Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
Email: fourcade@berkeley.edu

Evan Schofer: Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
Email: schofer@uci.edu

Acknowledgements: The authors contributed equally to this article. We thank Irene Bloemraad, Steven Brint, David Frank, Ann Hironaka, Ronald Jepperson, Howard Kimmeldorf, John Meyer, Francisco Ramirez, Sandra Smith, Sarah Soule; members of the Stanford Comparative Workshop and the Irvine Comparative Sociology Workshop. The usual disclaimer applies.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Fourcade, Marion and Evan Schofer. 2016. “Political Structures and Political Mores: Varieties of Politics in Comparative Perspective” Sociological Science 3: 413-443.
  • Received: May 8, 2015
  • Accepted: December 23, 2015
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a19


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Dissecting the Spirit of Gezi: Influence vs. Selection in the Occupy Gezi Movement

By on July 22, 2015 in Articles

Ceren Budak, Duncan J. Watts

Sociological Science, July 22, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a18

Abstract
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Do social movements actively shape the opinions and attitudes of participants by bringing together diverse groups that subsequently influence one another? Ethnographic studies of the 2013 Gezi uprising seem to answer “yes,” pointing to solidarity among groups that were traditionally indifferent, or even hostile, to one another. We argue that two mechanisms with differing implications may generate this observed outcome: “influence” (change in attitude caused by interacting with other participants); and “selection” (individuals who participated in the movement were generally more supportive of other groups beforehand). We tease out the relative importance of these mechanisms by constructing a panel of over 30,000 Twitter users and analyzing their support for the main Turkish opposition parties before, during, and after the movement. We find that although individuals changed in significant ways, becoming in general more supportive of the other opposition parties, those who participated in the movement were also significantly more supportive of the other parties all along. These findings suggest that both mechanisms were important, but that selection dominated. In addition to our substantive findings, our paper also makes a methodological contribution that we believe could be useful to studies of social movements and mass opinion change more generally. In contrast with traditional panel studies, which must be designed and implemented prior to the event of interest, our method relies on ex post panel construction, and hence can be used to study unanticipated or otherwise inaccessible events. We conclude that despite the well known limitations of social media, their “always on” nature and their widespread availability offer an important source of public opinion data.
Ceren Budak: Microsoft Research. Email: cbudak@microsoft.com

Duncan J. Watts: Microsoft Research Email: duncan@microsoft.com

Acknowledgements: The authors are grateful to Sandra Gonzales-Bailon, David Rothschild, and Mathew Salganik for several helpful conversations as well as their extensive comments on an earlier version of this article.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Budak, Ceren, and Duncan J. Watts. 2015. “Dissecting the Spirit of Gezi: Influence vs. Selection in the Occupy Gezi Movement.” Sociological Science 2: 370-397.
  • Received: December 20, 2014.
  • Accepted: February 4, 2015.
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v2.a18

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The Structure of Online Activism

By on February 12, 2014 in Articles

Kevin Lewis, Kurt Gray, Jens Meierhenrich

Sociological Science, February 18, 2014
DOI 10.15195/v1.a1
Abstract
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10 Citation

Despite the tremendous amount of attention that has been paid to the internet as a tool for civic engagement, we still have little idea how “active” is the average online activist or how social networks matter in facilitating electronic protest. In this paper, we use complete records on the donation and recruitment activity of 1.2 million members of the Save Darfur “Cause” on Facebook to provide a detailed first look at a massive online social movement. While both donation and recruitment behavior are socially patterned, the vast majority of Cause members recruited no one else into the Cause and contributed no money to it-suggesting that in the case of the Save Darfur campaign, Facebook conjured an illusion of activism rather than facilitating the real thing.

Kevin Lewis: Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego. E-mail: lewis@ucsd.edu

Kurt Gray: Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. E-mail: kurtgray@unc.edu

Jens Meierhenrich: Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science. E-mail: J.Meierhenrich@lse.ac.uk

Supplemental Materials

  • Citation: Lewis, Kevin, Kurt Gray, and Jens Meierhenrich. 2014. “The Structure of Online Activism.” Sociological Science 1: 1-9.
  • Received: September 16, 2013
  • Accepted: October 16, 2013
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v1.a1

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