Democratic Values and Social Belonging Protect Against Radicalization in Western Democracies: A Hierarchical Cluster Heatmap Analysis

Across contemporary democracies, there is growing concern that some citizens increasingly view violence as a legitimate means to pursue political, ideological, or religious goals. Such attitudes threatens not only personal safety but also the very conditions that make democratic life possible: civil liberties, pluralism, and non-violent conflict resolution.There is a growing need for person-centered, pattern-based approaches that treat individuals’ lived experiences as configurations rather than as independent predictors. Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) heatmaps provide one promising tool for this purpose. These heatmaps allow researchers to visualize, for each individual, how experiences of violence and insecurity, feelings of belonging and trust, democratic orientations, religiosity, life satisfaction, and political activism co-occur – and how these multidimensional profiles relate to support for political violence. Such visual, exploratory methods are particularly well suited to complex phenomena like radicalization, where different constellations of similar ingredients may lead to different outcomes. In this paper, we draw on large-scale survey data from seven Western democracies to investigate how risk and protective factors related to belonging, democracy, and education cluster together at the individual level, and how these clusters are associated with the justification of terrorism as a political means. By employing Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) heatmaps as a complementary method to traditional statistical analyses, we aim to illuminate distinct pathways toward higher or lower propensity for political violence, and to highlight the role of social belonging and democratic norms as potential protective factors with direct implications for educational practice and policy.