PAS KOJI LAJE NE GRIZE: BISMO LI TREBALI IZJEDNAČAVATI STAVOVE I PONAŠANJA U KONTEKSTU POLITIČKOG NASILJA?
A BARKING DOG NEVER BITES: SHOULD WE TREAT ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS AS EQUAL IN THE CONTEXT OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE?

Summary/Abstract: Despite the unquestionable relationship between attitudes and behaviors, many theorists agree that attitudes on political violence should not be equated with participation in political violence. Earlier studies have not explicitly focused on the validity of this equation in the context of radicalization. Therefore, the main goal of this study was to evaluate how precise can individuals be classified with respect to participation in political violence based on their attitudes on political violence. Analyses were conducted on a data set collected within the MyPLACE project at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 on youth (N = 16935) from fourteen European countries, including Croatia. After matching the participants in order to eliminate the potential sources of bias, the results have confirmed that both measures of attitudes towards political violence – justification of political violence and perceived efficacy of political violence – provided an independent and significant contribution to explaining the variance of participation in political violence. However, about one-third of participants were misclassified based on the mentioned variables, which provides an empirical confirmation of the notion that attitudes and behaviors in the context of political violence should not be equated.

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