Explaining the gendered politicisation of violence against UK politicians

In recent years, there has been increased attention to political violence in ‘stable’ contexts. UK MPs Jo Cox and Sir David Amess were murdered on duty. The German and US governments survived insurrection attempts. Dutch Minister recently Sigrid Kaag stepped down because of hate threats. Women in politics, and especially women of colour, routinely suffer sexual harassment on- and off-line. A now rich body of literature conceptualises the prevalence and forms of such violence and established that violence against politicians in ‘non-conflict’ settings is increasing and gender-differentiated (e.g., Bardall et al 2020; Krook 2020, Collignon et al, 2022). Fewer studies have examined the phenomenon’s political impacts. For example, Albaine (2015), Restrepo Sanín (2021, 2022) credit feminist activists in Latin American for problematising the phenomenon of violence against women in politics in the region and in international, inter-governmental normative frameworks. This paper contributes to evidence on political impacts of gendered political violence using the case of the UK. British political institutions have taken significant policy action to address violence against its politicians, from increased parliamentary security to political party codes of conduct on sexual harassment and online abuse. Conventional wisdom identifies the murder of Jo Cox MP as the catalyst for the politicisation of violence towards MPs as a policy problem and as a gendered phenomenon. However, there has been little in-depth academic inquiry into the reasons why violence against UK politicians emerged on the policy agenda. Furthermore, some evidence indicates that other factors, such as the increased use of social media from 2014 and the prevalence of abuse in the 2017 elections, were important in raising political attention to the phenomenon (Phillips, 2023). This paper uses process tracing to test and identify explanations for the politicisation of violence against UK politicians. Its rich evidence includes policy documents as well as original interviews and focus groups with MPs and other practitioners involved in policy development. The analysis focuses the development of the Committee on Standards in Public Life Report on ‘Intimidation in Public Life’ in 2017 as a proxy for politicisation. The main causal variable is the murder of Jo Cox. An alternative cause for politicisation is that different forms of violence, especially online, had been increasing for all MPs for years. Preliminary results indicate that while the murder of Jo Cox was important, it cannot adequately or solely explain the politicisation of the phenomenon. Critical actors such as the speaker of the House of Commons and the Prime Minster Theresa May, other ‘critical events’ such as the 2017 Westminster terrorist attack, as well as the context of (unregulated) social media are key parts of the explanations of the gendered politicisation of violence against UK politicians. A such, this paper will offer new empirical and theoretical insights about gendered political violence in ‘stable’ contexts.