Safety in numbers? Does positional power dilute the consequences of political violence?

Survey research conducted in Ireland as part of The Cost of Doing Politics: Gender Aspects of Political Violence project (Research Council of Norway Project No. 300618) finds gendered differences and within-group differences in relation to the consequences of political violence. Collectively, women are more likely than men to say that their political engagement has 1) made them more afraid, 2) lowered their levels of political ambition and 3) lessened their willingness to run for politics in future. However, women public representatives (those elected) were not more likely than their male counterparts to indicate opting out of politics. These findings reveal differential consequences among politicians in the face of political violence. In this paper we theorise how interpersonal resources (homosocial capital) and gender power arrangements in Irish political culture/politics, create “positional power” (Martínez and Verge 2023) advantages for men, thus diluting the effects/consequences of political violence for men in politics (“band of brothers” hypothesis). But we also unpack the concept of positional power to assess its value in explaining within-group differences, specifically those observed between elected and unelected women. We hypothesis that in comparison to unelected women, elected women have access to office resources, for example agenda-setting and policymaking, which mediates the cost of political violence (political office hypothesis). We set out our research design to investigate these hypotheses, as well as outline our research methods to collate and examine the coping strategies and resources available to politicians faced with political violence.