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we are funded by these television companies and more including comcast. >> you think this is just a community center? no, it's way more than that. comcast is partnering with a thousand community centers so students with low-income families can get the tools so they can be ready for anything. comcast supports c-span as a public service along with these other television providers giving you a front-row seat to democracy. >> welcome back to washington journal, we are joined by lilliana mason, she's also the coauthor of the book radical american partisanship, consequences for democracy, lilly, welcome to the program. >> thank you so much for having me. >> let's start with the institute, tell us about it and what the focus of your research

is there to strengthen global democracy by research group public facing work and explaining things to the public and providing advice to public officials and of course having increased quality of dialogue across differences and trying to encourage a democracy that includes all the parts of our society. i particularly study partisanship, polarization in the u.s. and now attitudes about political violence in the u.s. and americans'acceptance of higher levels of political violence and threats. host: let's talk about that. here is a headline from the washington post that says violent political threats surges 2024 begins hunting american democracy. what do you think is behind that surge? guest: this is the surge in the

new year but this is -- it didn't just start right now. this is been something that's been increasing over the last many years. in general, we have seen larger numbers of threats to local officials all the way across the country. this is having an impact on not only who stays in office but who runs for office in the first place because these threats have a real escalating effect. a bomb threat can stop people from doing their job during the day so a lot of this is intended to disrupt our politics but it's also intended to intimidate people from wanting to do their job in a way that requires principles and courage in these threats can be an effective way to silence people who might otherwise stand up to extremism. host: tell us how the nature of

political threats and political violence have evolved. you talked about violence against -- threats against elected officials and there is also swatting, a series of bomb threats against state capitals. what is the trajectory here? guest: this is something -- people have been looking into this during and after the trump administration. a lot of the threats have been two democrats and republicans who oppose trump. the idea of swatting which is calling the police to come to your house and telling them there is a murder or something and they come with a swat team is extremely disruptive and can be terrifying and dangerous. even things like doxing which is exposing people's personal information, it can requirements to recover.

these things have been increasing. the actual threats, calling somebody and offering a death threat to them has been well. as these things all the way through the trump administration but it spiked during times when trump was being threatened like during his impeachment and then after january 6 during -- deciding what the outcome of the election would be, there were more threats and we are seeing it continue on. it seems to respond to times are situations when trump himself seems to be under threat of persecution or losing power or some way he is being insulted or discriminated against in their view. host: we will take your calls for our guest. you can call us and are lined by party, democrats, (202) 748-8000 , republicans (202) 748-8001, an

independents (202) 748-8002 you can also text us at (202) 748-8003 and we are on facebook and x. you mentioned before that the attitudes and the tolerances of the public are shifting regarding their willingness to accept political violence net willingness is going up. can you tell us more about that and why that might be? guest: we started collecting data in 20, asking people, regular americans, to what extent do you think it's ok to use violence to attain political bowl -- goals or is it ok to threaten people from the other party and in 2017, the support for these kind of things was pretty low, 10% republicans and democrats but they seem to react to political events of during trump spur -- first impeachment, the numbers among republicans

when up to over 20% approval of using violence or threats. for democrats, the same bump wasn't there because they weren't under threat. after january 6, republicans went up again. democrats and republicans are at tenor 20% right now approving of using violence and threats to achieve their political goals. host: your organization called project protect democracy has a tracker online at protect democracy.org. it has this tracker with current impact and has several categories like elections and individual liberties. can you explain how this tracker works and where the data comes from? guest: we developed this project largely because i was moderating these attitudes in the public

and we know certain things about political violence and what it does in other countries. one thing we didn't have a sense of was what was the impact of violence on our democracy today. we collected a panel of a few hundred experts on political violence which includes academics, members of think tanks and people who have done research into political violence around the world. we asked them to fill out this survey assessing the degree to which violence is attacking eight different colors of democracies like election integrity, jude the judicial oversight of the executive, the freedom of expression, freedom of speech among americans and what we found from that -- this was done in a quarterly basis. currently, the level of worry of experts about the effect of violence on our democracy is not

low but it's not as high as it could be. a scale of one, everything is great and on a scale of five, everything has fallen. we are right now at about 2.6. host: that's a little over halfway to five. guest: yeah, that score reflects something between significant erosion of these institutions because of violence to this is in danger of falling. the current floor is somewhere between this is not good and this is about to fall apart. host: what is the american public supposed to do with that? what do you recommend for a regular american citizen? guest: we wanted this to be a resource for people to kind of keep track of these things over time. the reason we started it is we wanted to have a baseline of what experts were thinking before we get deep into election season.

ultimately, as we do this quarterly, we can show trendlines. our -- our experts getting more worry or less worried? it's sort of a barometer of the people who understand political violence and its role in a democracy worrying about today and has that increased over time and therefore, should be -- should be we did should we be worried? host: let's start talking to colors. keith in denver, colorado on the line for democrats. caller: good morning and very consistent work. i would like to posit a theory here. in the late 1980's, hyper partisanship and violence is tied to media for -- fragmentation. we've seen increased polarization for 25 or 30 years which correlates to the violence you are monitoring particularly domestic threats like christian

nationalism. that's one of the primary threats. for the first time in history, we had partisan news in the 1990's with the introduction of fox news. prior to that, a lot on the right believed that rush limbaugh was news. all of that programming was anti-liberal. as a result of that, fox has spawned a complete ecosystem that's been alternative reality. these are not news stations. they are information networks and entertainment but they are not what we call objective news. can you respond to that please?

guest: that's a really good insight actually. in my own research, i have combined that media consolidation and partisan news and partisan media with the rise of social media and also some deep demographic changes that are happening that happens within the two parties with republicans after the civil rights legislation of the 60's becoming increasingly having democrats moving to the republican party so we have a party that's largely white. it's this perfect storm of media resources and demographic changes and cultural differences emerging between the two parties so that every election we have is like a contest over who we are rather than what we want government to do. it's really important to pay attention to that. i agree with you on the media effect. i think it's dangerous for us to

have the entire media ecosystem that just kind of doesn't refer to each other. particular on the right, we see different evidentiary standards of news outlets on the far right where and not mainstream news outlet, people say yesterday we were wrong about this thing and they put a correction up. we don't see that as much on the right. there is not as much self reflection and searching for evidence based news. we are in a really tough situation. i think it's a combination of these media affects and democrats and republicans becoming very different types of people and it becomes increasingly difficult for them to talk to each other. also hear each other. or even to understand how anyone would vote for the other side because they don't know anybody who does. host: let's talk to a republican in california next. caller: hi, thank you for having

me on. i have two questions -- have you done any research to have any statistics on charismatic or political people like prime minister or presidents around the world and the political climate in which this happens? i find these people are polarizing and the politics around them are very aggressive. another thing i wanted to ask -- any thoughts on when donald trump was elected in 2016 why there is so much anger towards him? it was right off the get go in all the people that worked on his cabinet. a lot of yelling and telling people who pushed back on him and accosting his children and

grandchildren, picking on them at a restaurant. and that went on forever. it's still going on. thank you. guest: to your first question, there is research in other countries about when political systems break down. one of the big predictors of that is what i was talking about with the last caller, the ability of when a political system in a country realizes that realigns itself around ethnic or religious lines. that becomes a higher risk for political violence and civil war. i'm not suggesting we are going into that right now but it seems when our society becomes divided by these deep identities that are hard to compromise on like our own racial or religious identity, that's when political systems often fall apart.

it's very difficult to have an election that is also reflecting the status of religious groups or racial groups. it's not something the government was set up to do. as for animosity towards trump, this is one of the things where i think obama's administration had the most assassination attempts or threats in history. our politics are first of all just becoming much more toxic. most political figures at this point are getting death threats if they are prominent. there was a lot of anger at trump and i think there still is for saying things that were kind of explicitly violating norms of what we thought -- normal political norms like patterns of speech and talk about women and minority groups. honestly, running government in a way that felt more like a cult of personality than sort of a

stable, traditional presidency. that's my guess about why people were hostile for trump. honestly, they are quite hostile to him. most of that for my understanding is coming from deep worry about the quality of government and the ability of democracy to function and so on. host: we have a question for you over text. guest: right, yes. swatting is extremely dangerous especially for people, groups that tend to be marginalized,

disproportionally targeted by police like swatting a black american is different than swatting a white american, for example. the bots and international threats -- there is a group called the bridging device initiative at princeton that's working to track the number of threats to local officials by asking them. they have a survey of hundreds of local officials and he asked them about the extent to which they are being threatened. it's an interesting data set to look at. i don't know whether it's possible to know if these threats are coming from international places. a lot of these threats are phone calls. for a phone call that's not possible to mimic a u.s. area code, it seems like most of these threats are americans calling from within the united states and we have voicemail

recordings. this is one of the most scary and i think potent types of threats is someone yelling at someone else over the phone and offering dangerous threats. i don't actually know the answer to your question of how many might be international or not real but it seems that especially on these phone calls, they seem to be pretty authentic. host: let's go to manhattan, new york, independent, good morning. caller: good morning. happy new year to you. i may be a little late on this but the set is beautiful. you are an amazing host. i absolutely love you. i just wanted to get that in first. host: thank you. caller: donald trump seems to be using the internet to send threats. that's what it seems to be.

he put out a comment and disparaged the manhattan d.a. and afterwards he received credible threats. it did the same thing with the judge in d.c.. he put out comments about her but the one i think is most interesting is about a week or two ago after the main secretary of state was removed from the ballot, he didn't disparage her. he didn't insult her. all he did was he posted on social media her contact information. he put her bio which has a contact page. i said to myself i bet you within the next amount of time, couple of days, i bet she will get threats and lo and behold, watching television or the new york times, i don't know, it

said the main secretary of state now has threats. if any other american was doing that on social media because they knew that it would lead to a threat and possibly god for bid even worse, we would be held accountable. there must be some professional listening so he never once said we can link the threats to his social media. it's not even his comments, just social media alone. he knows that the end result of putting the information of these people out there is going to lead to this. it's impossible he can't know that would be the end result. why isn't he held responsible for that the way all of us would be? thank you, mimi, you're the

absolute breast. host: let's get a response. guest: i think there is an important difference between delivering a threat and encouraging a threat. it's a lot harder to hold people responsible for encouraging someone else to deliver a threat. it's easier to say the person that delivered the threat is the person that is doing the damage. one thing i found in my own research is that the power of elected leaders or political leaders in general is to either encourage or discourage violence -- violent threats or violent approaches to politics is pretty huge. we've done experiments where we had people read a quote from donald trump or joe biden that says violence is not ok. it reduces people's level of violence. it's quite easy to do that. our leaders have a lot of responsibility. it's probably not legal responsibility, i'm not a

lawyer. they certainly have moral and ethical responsibilities to speak responsively to their supporters. that means there is good and bad. it's easy for leaders to discourage violence if they speak out against it but also, if our leaders refused to discourage violence, they are extraordinarily encouraging it. one thing we should be doing as a society and the electorate is remind our elected leaders they have a responsibility to keep the peace and try to make sure these threats and violence is not occurring. when they don't do that, when they explicitly encourage violence or they just don't discourage it, we have a really risky situation and we should be asking more of our leaders. host: we haext from kevin.

guest: there is a lot of different types of violence. one is threats to other people. the blm riots like 96% of them were peaceful. probably it's a real tool to damage property and make chaos in a place is a way of using political violence or just sort of chaos to affect political outcomes. the black lives matter summer actually did have a political outcome. the question is -- what type of violence is occurring and what are the goals of the violence? the difference between the black lives matter protest and january 6, 2021 is that the black lives matter protest were not attempting to stop a political

process. the january 6 attack, the point of it was to stop the electoral certification of the election. that's directly connected to democratic procedures. blm was much more about raising the voice of people who are not being heard. it didn't actually attack a government and didn't actually create a situation in which our laws cannot be an acted. in terms of protest, that is generally to raise the voices of people who feel violence. you can have violence in both domains. i think the results of that violence really matters or the intent of the violence matters. but tickly when we have violence occurring in order to stop political officials from doing their job or to prevent legal processes from occurring, that's a different type of threat to a democracy. protest activity becomes

violence, it is protected under the first amendment and then it gets out of control. there is no protection under the first amendment for stopping the accounts of votes for example. host: let's get one more call from larry in hempstead, new york, republican. caller: good morning. with all due respect, violence, the root of violence, what causes the root of violence? it's anger. what's making people angry is a very extreme divisive media that is so thorough in their divisiveness that me as a black republican, in the last four years or eight years really since trump first took office, when i try to get one of my

friends families were democrats or liberals to try to come on the other side and listen and let me show them the evidence and show them the information we on the right have to counter whatever information they have, they won't give me a chance. they don't want to hear it. the job has been done so thorough. for them to say that liberals were the blm thing wasn't this just wasn't the same as the january 6 incident -- remember? these people have been more divisive. host: let's get a response. guest: basically, violence comes out of anger and it also comes out of frustration and passion. it usually corrupts when democracy doesn't seem to be working. you are right that democrats in 2016 in the state of virginia,

70% of hillary clinton supporters never meant a trump supporter and 70% of trump supporters never meant hillary supporter. it's difficult to talk across them moon we have different informational privileging certain points over others. we say this is the most important thing in the other sized debts and the other side says this is the most important side to me. those conversations are difficult to have but i would argue that they are important to have an keep having. it not only explains your side but you can begin by asking questions of people you disagree with and say why do you believe that, what events do you think led to this or what part of you is inclined to believe what you believe. curiosity towards people who i think it will lead to more open and honest conversations between democrats and republicans. i think those conversations are important and they should be had and they need to be had with more an aspect of curiosity rather than lecturing or

teaching or trying to tell our friends who don't agree with us what to think. host: liliana mason from the johns hopkinssns gore institute, mapping

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