Alarming Figures: A Framing Experiment on the Effect of Information About Extremist Political Violence on Radical Attitudes

Extremist political violence poses a fundamental challenge to constitutional democracies and is often theorized as a driver of reciprocal processes of radicalization. In Germany, more than 60 percent of politically motivated crimes in 2022 were attributed to extremist actors or organizations. This study examines how the ideological framing of extremist violence shapes punitive judgments and radical attitudes among already radicalized individuals, with particular attention to the assumptions of reciprocal radicalization theory. Using a survey experiment, participants are first exposed to statistical information on politically motivated extremist violence and then randomly assigned to framing conditions that attribute the threat to left-wing, right-wing, or religious fundamentalist actors. This design enables a causal assessment of how ideological threat attribution affects moral evaluations of political violence and attitudinal radicalization across ideologically distinct radicalized subgroups. The findings show that ideological framing exerts a systematic influence on punitive judgments. Violence attributed to religious fundamentalists is evaluated as more deserving of punishment than violence framed as left- or right-wing extremism. Among radicalized subgroups, punitive preferences are strongly structured by ideological identity: right-wing radicals are comparatively lenient toward right-wing perpetrators and more punitive toward religious fundamentalists, while left-wing radicals display the reverse pattern. These results are consistent with social identity theory and indicate pronounced in-group favouritism in the moral evaluation of political violence. By contrast, effects on radical attitudes are limited and asymmetric. Across the sample, ideological framing rarely produces generalized increases in radical attitudes, providing little support for strong versions of reciprocal or co-radicalization theory. Subgroup analyses reveal more conditional dynamics. Religious fundamentalists exhibit in-group radicalization when confronted with religiously framed threats, increasing both general extremist and cross-ideological radical attitudes. Right- and left-wing radicals respond more selectively, showing attitudinal reinforcement primarily in response to ideologically congruent threat frames. Exposure to out-group threats, however, often produces negligible or even dampening effects, suggesting dissociative rather than escalating dynamics. Taken together, these findings challenge models of reciprocal radicalization by demonstrating that ideological threat framing does not uniformly generate cross-ideological escalation. Instead, radicalization dynamics appear contingent on ideological identity, perceived relevance of the threat, and in-group boundaries. The study advances theoretical debates on political violence by identifying conditions under which framing mechanisms reinforce ideological alignment without producing broader cycles of reciprocal radicalization.