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The role of push, pull and personal factors in accepting political violence. From Individual to Network explanations

par Ognibene, Marco
Président du jury Jacobs, Dirk
Promoteur Pilet, Jean-Benoît
Publication Non publié, 2021-12-17

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

How general population accepts the use of political violence by non-state actors (i.e., political groups) and repressive violence by state authorities? This Ph.D. thesis tries to answer this broad research question by looking at how radicalisation is a multicausal puzzle and analysing how factors leading to the acceptance of political violence are interrelated. More precisely, the dissertation considers three different factors, i.e., push, pull, and personal factors. The analyses are based on a CATI survey among a representative sample of the national Belgian population (N = 2985 participants). The main purpose of this thesis is to consider the radicalization of opinions as a puzzle composed by different factors which interact and influence each other. More specifically, the thesis is interested to analyse the effect of grievances, people’s mindset, social identity theory, and interpersonal ego-networks (with a special focus on the latter).The first empirical chapter focuses on the cognitive path initiated by a specific push factor, i.e., grievances, towards the acceptance of political violence, and looking at how this is mediated by the personal factor “Belief in a Just World” mindset. In this chapter, I analysed how grievances initiate a path towards accepting political violence before passing through other factors that can mediate this relationship. To analyse this model, the chapter relies on an original CATI survey conducted among a random sample of 2,985 Belgian citizens. Using correlational data, the chapter asks how two forms of grievances (i.e., perceived discrimination and relative deprivation) are indirectly related to the acceptance of political violence. Findings show that people who are more discriminated against and those who consider being more relatively deprived, tend to consider the world as an unjust place. Subsequently, this vision of the world mediates the effect of grievances, by affecting differently the acceptance of political violence. More precisely, the direction of this mediating effect depends on who are the perpetrators of these actions, that is positive when the subject is a non-state actor and negative when the subject is the authority-state actor.The second empirical chapter puts respondents back in their social contexts and looks at personal networks as triggers of the radicalization of opinions. More specifically, the chapter focuses on the moderated mediating effect of social networks (pull factors) on the relationship between the dogmatic intolerant mindset (personal factors) and the acceptance of political violence. This chapter relies on the same observational data from the CATI survey conducted among a random sample of Belgian citizens (N = 2985); however, unlike the first chapter, we use network theory of radicalization and network data. In addition, the chapter uses a trajectory model which relies on the moderated mediating effects between pull and personal factors, and more precisely on the role of network density, ideological homophily and dogmatic intolerance. Findings point to a significant mediating effect of network composition (i.e., ideological homophily) on the relationship between Dogmatic Intolerance and the acceptance of political violence. Moreover, the mediating effect is actually moderated by the network structure (i.e., density). The positive relationship between Dogmatic Intolerance and Homophily is reinforced in presence of higher than for lower levels of the network density.The third empirical chapter focuses on another pull factor, i.e., social identity. This chapter tries to overcome the main limitation of the first two empirical chapters, that is, that the outcomes of interest analysed in the two models are composed of violent political actions perpetrated by (or against) decontextualized political groups. The limitation of this approach is that it might consider that respondents could have reacted differently depending on whether they could identify with the ideology defended by the group. To address this limitation the chapter relies on the experimental protocol of the FAR survey, in which three different vignettes have been read to the respondents. These vignettes report different actions perpetrated by (or against) the respondents’ ideological ingroup and outgroup. In the end, the results are mixed. First, in the within-subject analysis, only the “power of love” towards their own ingroup (i.e., ingroup favouritism) leads people to change their attitudes, and thus showing more acceptance when the actions are perpetrated by the ingroup, compared to when they are perpetrated by a neutral group. Conversely, the “power of hate” (i.e., ingroup derogation), does not show any kind of effect on the shifting attitude (vignette 3), or even a counterintuitive pattern (vignette 2). Second, the results differ significantly in the between-subject analysis. In this case, the experimental manipulation shows a strong significant effect of outgroup hate. In this case, respondents in the treatment group (actions perpetrated by ideological outgroup) show less agreement towards political violence, compared to the respondents in the control group (the same actions in treatment group but this time perpetrated by ideological ingroup). More importantly, the chapter shows that this negative effect of outgroup hate in the treatment group is moderated by the ideological distance of the respondents’ ingroup-outgroup. The more the respondents consider their ingroup and outgroup to be distant, the more they show a higher predisposition to reject the action perpetrated by the ideological outgroup.The fourth and final chapter circles back and considers the radicalisation factors to be interrelated. More specifically, this chapter addresses and gives some empirical explanation as to why some experimental manipulations did not work (in the within-subject analysis). To do so, we went back to the network explanations, stressing that the normative evaluations of the respondents’ network towards political violence may have affected the individual’s level of acceptance concerning political violence. Relying on a mix of experimental and observational data, and using network theory and network data, the chapter has two main findings. First, network similarity can influence people’s opinions, thereby reinforcing the attachment and the level of influence of prior opinions. Second, network dissimilarity is also conducive to an important social influence effect. When the peer’s network tends to be dissimilar – meaning that different opinions towards some issue exist between the respondents and the networks – then people change their attitudes about that issue to conform to the dominant opinions of the network. This last result can explain the counterintuitive pattern observed in the within-subject analysis of the third empirical chapter.In short, the research protocol developed for this dissertation provides an alternative explanation of radicalisation of opinions. These explanations are based on original empirical data and theoretical approaches. The thesis empirically proves that radicalisation is a puzzle composed of many interrelated factors and, more importantly, a social construct which is mainly affected by the interpersonal social networks in which people are embedded.