Geographic unevenness of political violence vs minimized communication distance

Determine how the empirically observed highly uneven geographic distribution of incidents of political violence in the continental United States relates to the minimization of effective communication distance enabled by cell-phone and social media networks, by characterizing the linkage between spatial heterogeneity in event occurrence and widespread, distance-insensitive communication flows.

Background

The paper analyzes ACLED data on politically motivated violence in the continental United States from 2020 through 2024 and finds that incident locations are not uniformly or Poisson random, instead forming coherent geographic clusters with strong coastal concentrations and sparse central regions. At the county level, counts of incidents are highly skewed, with most counties reporting none and a small number reporting many.

Despite these pronounced spatial patterns, the authors note that modern communication via cell-phones and social media dramatically reduces effective communication distance, enabling rapid dissemination of information and mobilization across geography. The unresolved question highlights a tension between strong spatial heterogeneity in observed violence and the near-frictionless spread of information and coordination through social networks.