Episode
S9 Ep20: What triggered January 6?
- Podcast
- VoxTalks Economics
- Published
- Mar 20, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1259
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://audioboom.com/posts/8876448
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Summary
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. Wright. 2023. "Isolation and Insurrection: How Partisanship and Political Geography Fueled January 6, 2021." CEPR DP18209. To cite this episode: Phillips, Tim, and Konstantin Sonin. 2026. “What triggered January 6?” VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE. About the guest Konstantin Sonin is the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Born in the Soviet Union, he has spent his career studying how political institutions work under stress,…