No matter what you want to call the events at the capitol on Jan 6, they were undoubtedly violent – towards property and people — and the violence was intended to serve a political goal: registering discontent, frightening lawmakers into voting as the rioters wanted, or, more extremely, overturning the election and keeping President Trump in office.  

Political violence is (thankfully) not currently the norm in the US, but the violence at the Capitol was not particularly surprising based on what we know about when political violence happens. Most generally, violence happens when people feel they can’t get the outcomes they want or need by using formal or legal methods.

One key trigger of political violence is perceived electoral fraud; fraud undermines elections, which are the primary non-violent channel for influencing political outcomes. In Nigeria, where political violence is unfortunately fairly common, perceptions of fraud are more important than actual fraud in predicting whether individuals will turn to violence. The Capitol rioters almost certainly believed the election was fraudulent: Trump and his allies in government and media worked before the election and after to convince supporters that the election was illegally manipulated by everyone from poll workers to the makers of polling machines. A Quinnapiac poll found that 77% of Republicans (and not just the tiny minority of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol) believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Violence can also be incited by elites, even in very subtle ways. For example, when politicians say they are “fighting”, rather than “working”, for a given policy or outcome, supporters increase their stated willingness to use political violence. Very likely, Trump’s language encouraged violence among his most devoted supporters. Both before and during the capitol rally, Trump and his allies made overt references to fighting. Some of these statements were extreme and arguably not entirely metaphorical: the Arizona GOP, for example, asked supporters on Twitter whether they were willing to die for Trump.  

Once prompted to support violence in service of their political goals, citizens must decide whether the gain they are seeking outweighs the risk of engaging in political violence; those who stormed the Capitol had to be willing to be arrested or, worse, killed, during their attack. Hundreds of experiments demonstrate that human beings are far more willing to take on risk when they are trying to avoid losing something they already have than when they are trying to gain something they don’t. (This is called prospect theory and it is why, historically, so many riots have occurred over taxation or price inflation: both situations involve people losing money or purchasing power they have already earned.) The unique pattern that appeared in so many states in the 2020 elections – in which in-person, disproportionately Republican votes were counted first and mail-in Democratic ballots second – likely drove a profound sense for those who supported President Trump that they had won the election and then had it taken away. Those who experienced the loss would be, on average, far more willing to take action – violent or otherwise — than they would have had the Democrats appeared to be winning from the start.

Together, these factors created “a perfect storm” from which violence was, in my opinion, almost inevitable. We can only hope that the insurrection at the Capitol was the worst of it.