S9 Ep20: What triggered January 6?
From VoxTalks Economics by VoxTalks
March 20, 2026 · 21 min · Season 9 · Episode 20
About this episode
The episode explores the factors that led to the escalation of the January 6 protests into a riot, focusing on partisanship and political geography.
Two explanations circulated immediately after the March to Save America on January 6, 2021 turned into a riot: a mob manipulated by a demagogue, or ordinary citizens defending democracy against a stolen election. Konstantin Sonin, David Van Dijcke, and Austin Wright have used anonymised location data from forty million mobile devices to investigate why the protests escalated so dramatically. No surprise: partisanship was the strongest predictor of attendance, proximity to Proud Boys chapters and use of the far-right social network Parler also increased participation. But political isolation amplified the movement: the communities most over-represented among those who traveled to Washington were small Republican enclaves surrounded by Democrat-leaning areas, politically and socially cut off from their neighbours. And participation also spiked in counties that experienced a "midnight swing," where the reported vote count favoured Trump on election night before shifting to Biden as mail-in ballots were counted. These were precisely the counties where the "Stop the Steal" narrative landed hardest. The research behind this episode: Sonin, Konstantin, David Van Dijcke, and Austin L…
People in this episode
Host: Tim Phillips
Guests: Konstantin Sonin, David Van Dijcke, Austin Wright
Topics covered
- January 6
- partisanship
- political geography
- protests
- insurrection
- democracy
- election
Keywords
- January 6
- protests
- partisanship
- political isolation
- election
- Stop the Steal
- Proud Boys
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: VoxTalks Economics, Parler, CEPR
Books & works: Isolation and Insurrection: How Partisanship and Political Geography Fueled January 6, 2021
More episodes of VoxTalks Economics
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- S9 Ep32: The digital money supply · June 5, 2026 · 27 min
- S9 Ep31: How well does patent screening work? · May 29, 2026 · 33 min
- S9 Ep30: Redefining the monetary standard · May 22, 2026 · 26 min
- S9 Ep29: Guns and Butter · May 15, 2026 · 21 min
- S9 Ep28: Immigration and integration in Europe · May 8, 2026 · 25 min
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