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Far Right Extremism, Grievance, and Violence in the US

Why Existing Theories Fall Short

• Individual response models (strain, rational choice): violence stems from frustration, deprivation, or cost-benefit calculation.
• Social context models (social learning, social control, life-course): violence stems from peers, family, weakened bonds, and turning points.
• Far-right extremists are mostly drawn from groups with relative social, political, and economic advantage, so deprivation alone does not explain them.
• January 6 participants were, apart from race and gender, largely indistinguishable from typical Americans.

Grievance Among Extremists

• Here's a quick look at grievance across extremist groups from PIRUS dataset.

A Different Explanation: Group Position

• Group position theory (Blumer 1958; Bobo 1999): grievance is a defense of status, not excelusively a response to loss.
• Dominant-group members may see other groups' gains as a threat to their "rightful place," even when their own conditions have not worsened.
• Relative deprivation (Stouffer; Pettigrew) supplies the comparison; laissez-faire racism supplies the language of fairness.
• Thus, equality demands are reframed as persecution, and violence is seen as defense and restoration.

Does Grievance Predict Violence?

• Strain and rational choice predict grievance raises violence across all extremist groups (H1).
• Group position theory predicts it matters specifically for the far right (H6).
• These figures compare violence by grievance and ideology.

Types of Grievance

• Grievance may be material (jobs, resources), symbolic (status, recognition), or demographic (population share).
• The heatmap shows which types appear in which contexts.

Dominant Groups and Positional Threat

• If grievance reflects a threat to dominant status, its effect should be strongest among whites (H7).
• These figures examine that pattern.

Summary

• Far-right violence is better understood as defense of group position than as a product of individual deprivation.
• Perpetrators experience violence as defense of an order they see as natural, just, and under threat.

Hypotheses

• Strain, rational choice: grievance, marginalization, and network embeddedness predict violence across all ideologies.
• Social learning: radical peers, family, and online exposure drive violence and absorb the effect of grievance.
• Social control, life-course: bond erosion and life disruptions predict violence regardless of ideology.
• Group position: grievance predicts violence among the far right ONLY; not far-left or jihadist actors AND the effect is stronger for whites, adds explanatory power beyond strain, and is amplified by life-course disruption.