“If Abortions Aren’t Safe, Neither Are You”: Public Support for Violent Tactics in U.S. Abortion Politics

What drives support for political violence: opportunity structures, moralized attitudes and strong identities, or general predispositions? We examine these questions in the context of abortion politics, which has been understudied by political violence scholars despite abortion constituting one of the most frequent targets of politically violent attacks in the United States. Using nationally representative survey data and an embedded survey experiment, we find that Americans view violent tactics as fundamentally distinct from conventional protest. Support for such tactics has little to do with the side respondents take on abortion, or the extremity or moralization of their abortion attitudes and identities. Rather, support for violent tactics is better predicted by general predispositions toward aggression and hostile sexism. Taken together, our findings suggest that an appetite for violence is concentrated not among the most ardent believers, but among a small subset who hold more aggressive and prejudiced attitudes across a range of issues.