I approach political incivility as a subjective and context-dependent perception - a construct shaped by what individuals believe in (e.g., their political attitudes) and who they are (e.g., their psychological predispositions), as well as the society they live in (e.g., its cultural norms, political climate, and institutional structures). My research in this area asks: When do citizens perceive political communication as uncivil? When do they tolerate, or even appreciate incivility in politics? This perspective was first developed in my PhD dissertation and has since informed a co-authored book, "The Psychology of Attack Politics" (with Alessandro Nai & Luka P. Otto), as well as observational and experimental studies (see "Incivility Does Not Exist" in The Journal of Politics and “Uncivil Yet Persuasive” in Political Psychology).

This strand of my research examines how citizens come to view violence as a legitimate form of political action, especially in democratic contexts. I specifically investigate how individual predispositions toward aggressiveness and partisan identities interact with situational triggers - e.g., perceived injustice, status threat, or emotionally charged events - to legitimize violence and erode democratic norms. My ongoing projects combine survey experiments, panel data, and natural experiments to understand the psychological and social roots of democratic backsliding.  One project exemplifying this approach leverages a rolling cross-sectional survey conducted during the 2024 US Presidential elections to causally test partisan shifts in support for political violence in the wake of the Luigi Mangione attack. This research is currently under review and available as an OSF preprint. 

My work in this area investigates how hostile rhetoric from political elites can (de)mobilize, divide, and radicalize the public. I focus especially on the impact of hostile or aggressive forms of campaign behavior, and how citizens respond to these strategies based on their partisan identities, as well as their individual predispositions towards conflict. This research draws on a mix of comparative observational data, expert surveys, and experimental evidence. For instance, one ongoing project combines post-electoral survey data from 35 elections worldwide, expert-coded evaluations of candidate behavior in those elections, and an original survey experiment conducted in the US to test how candidates' uncivil attacks can either intensify or mitigate voters' affective polarization, depending on their partisan identities.