The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Chiara Vargiu, who takes us back to Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech which preceded the coup attempt at the US Capitol. Can political leaders’ violent rhetoric contribute to a radicalised mindset which produces partisan violence, then?
This can be described as stochastic terrorism: leaders’ inflammatory rhetoric is not in itself calling for violent action, but it is amplified through mass or social media, and this normalised radical ideas to the extent that some individuals take it upon themselves to commit violent, terrorist acts against their perceived political opponents. This means that political leaders retain plausible deniability: they never made explicit calls for violence, and can claim that violent followers misunderstood their comments.
Do individuals recognise the ambiguous language of stochastic terrorism, then? Does this differ depending on whether such language comes from in- or out-group leaders? What happens if they do not recognise it? Does this make them more susceptible to such rhetoric?
The project explored this through a panel survey conducted in the US during the 2024 presidential election; this was done in 20 batches of some 130 respondents during the final two months of the campaign in order to cover as much of the political rhetoric during that time as possible. Voter ratings of political rhetoric were compared with expert ratings.
Out-party rhetoric was systematically over-, and in-party rhetoric systematically under-rated by voters; the more severe language from the in-party becomes, however, the more likely voters are to recognise it.
