service along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. >> if you ever miss any of c-span's coverage, you can find it anytime online.o videos of key hearings, debates and other events future markers that guide youwsworthy highlights. these points of interest markers appear on the right-hand side of your screen when you hit play on select videos. the timeline makes it easy to quickly get an idea of what was debated and decided in washington. scroll through and spend a few minutes on c-span's points of inhost: welcome back to washington journal. we are joined by lily mason, associate professorscience at johns hopkins. she is also the co-author of a book called radical american partisanship hostility, its causes and consequences for democracy. welcome to the program. guest: thank you for having me.

hotell us about the institute and the focus of your research there. guest: is broadly to sistrengthen global democracy. the way we are trying to do that is through research, public facing work, explaining things to the public and to public officials and of course having increased quality of dialogue across differences and trying to more pluralistic democracy that includes all of the voices that are part of our society. i particularly study partisanship polarization in the u.s. and attitudes about political violence in the u.s. and american sort of accepther levels of political violence and threats. host: let's talk about that. here is awashington post that says violent political threats surge as 2020 four begins, haunting american democracy. what do guest: this is the surge in the new year. it didn't just start right now. this has been increasing over

many years. in general we have seen larger numbers of threats to local elected officials all across the country. this is having an impact not only who stays in office but who runs for office in the first place because these threats have real intimidating effect. something like a bomb threat stops people from doing their job during the day. a lot of this is intended to disrupt our politics first of all bud to intimidate people from wanting to do their job in a way that requires principles and c these threats can be an effective way to silence people who might otherwise stand up extremism. host: tell us about the nature of political threats and political violence and how they've evolved. there is also something called swatting that's happening. a series o bomb threats against

state capitals. what's the trajectory here? >> this is something that -- people basically have been looking into this during and after the trump administration. a lot of the threats have and republicans who have opposed trump and so the idea of swatting house and telling them there's a murderer and so they come with a swat team is extremely disruptive it can be even just things like dioxin which is exposing people's personal take months to recover from being docked. these are things that have been increasing the actualhreat, calling somebody and offering a death threat to them has also been increasing. as these things all the way th but really with big spikes during times where trump was being threatened like during his

impeachment after january 6 deciding the outcome of the election, there were a lot more threats and we have just seen itontinue simmering on. but it does seem to respond to times or situations when trump himsel to be under threat of persecution or losing power or some way that trump is being insulted or discriminated against in their view. host: we will take your calls for our guests. you can call us on t party. democrats 202-748-8000. republicans. independents 202-748-8002. you had mentioned before that the attitudes and tolerances of the public are shiftingregarding their willingness to accept political violence and that that is going up. can you tell us more about why

that might be? >> we started collecting data in 2017 asking regularricans to what extent do you think it's ok to use violence to achieve your political goals. in 2017, the support for these ty it was about 10% for both democrats and republicans. during trump's first impeachment the numbers among republicans went up over 20% approval of for democrats the same bump wasn't there because they were not under threat. ri after january 6 republican approval of violence spiked again. today we are at both democrats and republicans between 10% and 20% approving of using violence and threats to achieve their political goals. host: your called project protect democracy has a

tracker online at protect democracy.org. áhit has this tracker current impact and severallike elections, individual liberties. can you explain how this tracker works and where the data comes from? >> we this project because i was monitoring these attitudes in the public and we know certain things about political violence and what ithes. one thing we didn't have a sense of will is what is the impact of violence on our democracy today? a panel of a few hundred experts on political violence and this includes academics, people who have done political violence around the world. we asked them to fill out this survey assessing the degree to which violences of democracy. these include things like election integrityfreedom of expression,

freedom of speech among americans. what we found from that was -- we have now done two waves of this. we are doing it quarterly. cuy at 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. on aon to five democracy has fallen, right now scores are about 2.6. that's a little over halfway to five. guest:. score reflects something of these institutions because of violence to this is in danger of falling. score is something between this is not good and this is about to fall apart. host: what is the american public supposed to do wit what are you recommending for a regular american citizen? guest: we wanted this to be a resource for people to keep track of these things over time.

we started it because we wanted to have a baseline of what in get really deep into election season. ultimately as we do this quarterly, we will be able to shour experts getting more worried or less worried? just to have a barometer of what are people political violence and its role in democracy worried about today and has that increased over time and should we be worried about this particular area of democracy? host: let's start talking to callers. first up is keith on the line for democrats. caller: good morning. very interesting work. i would like to posit a theory. in the fairness doctrine. i think hyper-partisanship, political violence directly tied to media fragmentation. we have seen increased polarization for about 25-30 years. which correlates to the

that you are monitoring, the threats. particularly domestic threats. white christian nationalism we know and white supremacy of those primary threats. for the first time in we have partisan news in the 1990's with the introduction of fox news. prior to that, a lot on the believed that talk radio, rush limbaugh was news. all of that programming was anti-liberal. so as a result of that, fox has spawned a complete ecosystem that's an alternative reality. aps. these are not news stations. they are information networks entertainment, but they are not what we call objective news. can you respond to that please?

that's a really good insight actually. in my own research i have combined that affect of media consolidation and partisan mediawith the rise of social media and also some really deep demographic changes the parties, with republicans after the civil rights legislation of the 60's white southern democrats gradually move to the republican party so now we have a republican party that is largely white and rural.kind of this perfect storm of media resources and demographic changes and cultural differences emerging b the two parties so that every election that we have is like a contest over who we are rather than what we want government tomportant to pay attention to that, i agree with you on the media effects. i think it is really dangerous for use media ecosystems that don't even refer to each other and particularly on the right, we see very

different evidentiary standards of news outlets on the far right . in a mainstream news outlet we see wrong about this thing. we don't see that as much on the right. there isn't as much selfor evidence based news. so we are in a tough situation. it's a combinationhese media effects and democrats and republicans becoming very different types of people and it becomesdi each other and also hear each other, or even to understand how anyone would vote for the other side because they don't know anybody host: let's talk to mary next, a republican in california. caller: on. i have two questions. have you done any research or do you have any statistics charismatic or political people like prime minister's,

presidents, attempted assassinations and the political climate in which this happens? because these people are and the politics around them are very aggressive. another thing i wanted to ask is any thoughts donald trump was elected in 2016 why there was so much anger towards him right off the get go,is family and all the people that worked on his cabinet. a lot of yelling, telling people to push back on them. accosting their children and icking them out of restaurants. in that kind of went on forever. it is still going on. all right. thank you. guest: to your first question there is research in other countries about when political systems breakof the big predictors of that is what i was just talking

about, when a political system in a country realigns itself around racial or ethnic or religious lines, that becomes risk for civil breakdowns, political violence even civil war. which i'm no we are going into right now. it does seem like when our societies become divided by these really deep identities that are really hard on, that's when political systems often fall apart. it's just very election it is also reflecting the status of religious or racial groups. that's not something the government was set up to do. as for animosity towards trump this is one of those things where obama'se most assassination attempts or threats in history. our politics are first of all just becoming much more and most political figures at this point are getting death

threats if they are promifigures. there was a lot of anger at trump and there still is, for saying things that were kindought to be normal political norms, like the patterns of speechand honestly, running government in a weight that felt more like a cult of personali than a stable traditional presidency. so that's my guess about why people were hostile towards trump. think they honestly still are quite hostile to him. most of that from my understanding is coming from deep worry about the quality of government the ability of democracy to function and so on. host: we ha c and swattingguest: right.

ng is extremely dangerous especially for people, groups that tend to be targeted by police. swatting a black american is going to be a different thing than swatting a white american for example. the bots and international threats, there is a group called the bridging divides initiativenceton working to track the number of threats to local officials by asking them. they have a survey of hundreds they ask them about the extent to which they are being threatened. it's a really interesting data set look at. i don't know whether it's possible to know if these threats are coming from international placesse threats are phone calls. for a phone call, it's not that it's impossible to mimic a u.s. area code. but it does seem like most of these threats are americans calling from within the united states and we have voicemailthis is

one of the most scary and potent types of these threats is someone at someone else over the phone and offering really dangerous threats to them. i don't actually know the answer to your question of how mthem might be international or not real. it does seem like especially on these phone calls they seem to be pretty authentic.host: let's go to manhattan, new york. independent. anderson. caller: good morning. happy new year. i may be a little late on this but the site is beautiful. the light comes in and you are i absolutely love you. i can only basically watch you. i have a question. donald trump seems to using the internet to send threats. that's what it seems to be. he put out a comment, and he

disparaged the manhattan d.a.. afterwards he receiv fbi credible threats. he did the same thing with a judge in d.c. about her. the one i think is most interesting is about a week or the main secretary of state removed him from the ballot, he didn't disparage her. he didn't insult her. all he did -- he posted on social media her contact informcontact page and i said to myself, i bet you within the next amount ofbet she's going to get threats. and lo and behold, watching television, the secretary of state now has threats. and i said to myself, if any other american using social media because they

knew that it would lead to a threat bid worse than a threat, we would be held accountable. so -- there must be someone in the legal profession listening to me now. how does he never once -- i have never heard anyone say we can link the threat to his social media. alone he knows that the end result of putting the information of these people out there is going to lead to threats. it's imss can't know that would be the end result. so why isn't he held responsible for that the way all of us would echo and thankou. you are the absolute best. host: let's get a response. guest: i think there is aence between delivering a threat and encouraging threats and it's a lot harder to hold someone for encouraging the threat.

one thing i found in my own research is the power ofaders or political leaders in general to either encourage or discourage violent threats or violent approaches to politics is pretty huge. and we've done experiments where we have just had people read a quote from trump joe biden that says violence is not ok, and it reduces peoples approval of violence. it's quite easy to do that. our leaders i think have a lot of responsibility. it's probably not legal responsibility. a lawyer. but they certainly have moral and ethical responsibility to speak responsibly to theirthat means there is good and bad here. one is it's easy for leaders to encourage violence if they speak out against it. if they are refusing to discourage violence, they are powerfully encouraging it. one thing we should be doing as

a society and electorate is to be really reminding our elected leaders that they have a respon peace and tried to make sure these threats and violence are not occurring and when the't discourage it we have a really risky situation and we should be asking more about leaders. have a text from kevin who is asking, does ms. mason the blm riots political violence? guest: there's a lot of differentolence. one is threats to other people. one is actual violence. the blm riots to the extent -- 96% of them were peaceful. property damage is a real tool property and make sort of chaos in a place, is violence or just sort of chaos to affect

political outcomes. the black lives matter summer the question is what type of violence is occurring and what are the violence. the difference between the black lives matter protests in the january 6, 2021 is that the black lives matter protests were not to stop a political process. the january 6 the tax were actually the point of it was to stop the electoral certification of the election. that's directly connected to democratic procedures. blm wasvoice of people who were not being heard. it didn't actually attack a government, it didn't actually which our laws could not be enacted. in terms of protests, generally that is to raise u of people who feel silenced. so you can have violence in both domains. i think the result of that really matters or the intent of that violence really

matters and particularly when we have violence occurring in order to either stop political offici from doing their job or prevent legal processes from occurring. that's a different type of threat to a democracy than protest activity that becomes violent, which in the first place is protected under the first amendment. and then it gets out of control. the first amendment for stopping the count of votes for ehost: let's get one more call from larry, republican. caller: good morning, ladies. th all due respect -- let me say this. the root of violence, what causes the root of violence? ger. what's making people angry? that is so federal and their divisiveness that me as a black

republican, in the last four years or eight years really, since trump had first taken office i try to get one of my friends family who are democrats or liberals to just try to come on thelisten, to let me show them the evidence and information that we on the right have to counter whatever information on the left they won'chance. they don't want to hear it. like i said, the job has been done so thorough. they can say that liberals or the blm thing wasn't the same as the january 6. do you remember what she said about chase them out wherever you see them? you've got to be kidding me. these people have been more divisive. host: let's get a response. guest: yes, violence comes out of anger. it also of frustration, passion. it usually erupts when democracy doesn't seem to be working.

and you arein 2016 in the state of virginia, 70% of hillary clinton supporters had never met a trump supporters and vice versa. we and it is very difficult to talk across them especially when we have different sources of information or we are privileging certain points over other points. this is the morton -- most important thing to me. those have what i would argue they are very important to have and keep from people you disagree with, saying why do you believe them, what event led to this or what part of you is inclined to believe what you believe? curiosity is important. i think it will lead to more open and honest conversations betwee i think those conversations are important and they really need to be had with more an aspect of curiosity rather ting or teaching and trying to tell

our friends what to think. host: liliana mason, thank you for joining us today. >> c-span's washington journal our form to discuss the latest issues on governmentolitics and public policies. saturday morning, we talk about the newly strained relations between the u.s. and china in the afelections in taiwan with our guest. and a look at the 2washington journal. join the conversation live saturday morning now or online or online at c-span.org. >> a healthy democracy doesn't just looit looks like this.

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