Predicting radicalism after perceived injustice: The role of separatist identity, sacred values, and police violence

Perceptions of injustice are central to fueling violent political action, though not everyone within a social movement will support violence in response to collective grievances. So who supports violence and who doesn’t after perceived injustice? To address this question, we followed up on the same individuals (N = 805) before and after a court decision in Catalonia (Spain) sentencing nine separatist leaders to prison, an event that led to mass violent and nonviolent protests. We tested three hypotheses by combining classical theories of collective action and more recent extremism models and found support for all three hypotheses. Namely, individuals who exhibited steeper increases in radicalism (controlling for activism) after the court ruling were those who had previously experienced police violence (social dynamics hypothesis), those who identified as separatists (separatist identity hypothesis), and those who held Catalan independence as a sacred value (sacred value hypothesis). Our findings offer a complex picture of real-world conflict settings, where the three evaluated factors seem to be intertwined. We discuss potential venues to restore inter-group relations after perceived injustice, with an assessment of how likely these strategies are to succeed based on the three adopted perspectives. peerReviewed publishedVersion

对不公的感知是催生暴力政治行动的核心动因，尽管并非所有社会运动参与者都会支持以暴力回应集体冤屈。那么，在感知到不公后，究竟哪些人会支持暴力行动，哪些人不会？为解答这一问题，我们针对805名受访个体（N=805）开展了追踪调研，覆盖西班牙加泰罗尼亚地区一项法院判决的前后时段——该判决判处9名分离主义领袖入狱，这一事件随后引发了大规模暴力与非暴力抗议活动。我们结合集体行动经典理论与近年新兴的极端主义研究模型提出三项假设，并通过调研验证了全部三项假设。具体而言，在法院判决后激进主义水平（已控制行动主义变量）增幅更为显著的个体，分别是此前曾遭遇警方暴力的群体（社会动力学假设（social dynamics hypothesis））、自认分离主义者的群体（分离主义身份假设（separatist identity hypothesis）），以及将加泰罗尼亚独立视为神圣价值的群体（神圣价值假设（sacred value hypothesis））。我们的研究为现实世界的冲突场景勾勒出一幅复杂图景：上述三项评估因素彼此交织关联。我们还基于所采用的三项理论视角，探讨了感知不公后修复群体间关系的潜在路径，并评估了各类策略的成功可能性。经同行评议的已发表版本