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Partisanship should affect evaluations of Congress just as it affects evaluations of the president, and these institutional evaluations should affect political trust. We argue that the relationship between partisanship and trust is dependent on partisan control of Congress and that much of party identification's influence on trust occurs indirectly through approval of governmental institutions. Copyright (c) 2006 Southwestern Social Science Association.

An understanding of contemporary U.S. politics requires an understanding of authoritarianism and perceptions of outgroup threat. Previous research suggests that the threat of terrorism and growing authoritarianism within the Republican Party help to explain Donald Trump’s electoral victory (Hetherington & Weiler, 2009; MacWilliams, 2016). We replicated and extended previous findings through the use of 2 surveys completed by 704 participants and found that those higher in authoritarianism were more conservative, more Republican, more likely to support Trump, and more likely to perceive Mexicans and Muslims as threatening. In addition, we found that those high in authoritarianism and outgroup threat perception were more likely to support antidemocratic policies targeting outgroups (such as implementing a Muslim registry and profiling Mexicans) and to abandon the rule of law by postponing elections and fast-tracking the deportation of illegal immigrants. Together, authoritarianism and outgroup threat accounted for about half of the variance in support for Trump and in support for these antidemocratic policies. We found that while perceptions of outgroup threat explain more unique variance for implicitly antidemocratic policies (those where the public might not realize that the policies violated democratic norms), authoritarianism explained more unique variance in support of more explicitly antidemocratic policies (those where the public knew the policies were unconstitutional). Finally, we demonstrated that Altemeyer’s (1981) original conception of authoritarianism as consisting of 3 distinct components (aggression, submission, and conventionalism) is a powerful tool for understanding contemporary U.S. political attitudes and that aggression had the biggest influence on support for antidemocratic policies targeting outgroups.

Previous research shows that a large segment of the U.S. population has maintained factually inaccurate beliefs concerning Iraq for at least a decade after the start of the Iraq war. These beliefs were maintained despite the fact that significant press coverage challenged them, a bipartisan Senate committee denounced them, and no new convincing evidence has surfaced to support them. The authors believe that 2 ideological preferences, authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, provide the motivational mechanisms for individuals to adopt and maintain factually inaccurate beliefs because such beliefs are consistent with their preferences. The authors combine and extend previous research by examining the relationships between authoritarianism and social dominance, the holding of factual misperceptions years after the U.S. military entered Iraq in 2003, and support for the Iraq war and a broader foreign policy of preemption. Using a student sample, they found that those higher in authoritarianism and social dominance orientation held more misperceptions about the Iraq war, which, in turn, predicted support for military engagement in Iraq and for a broader preemptive military policy. The number of misperceptions held partially mediated the effect of authoritarianism and social dominance orientation on support for war. These factual misperceptions serve as justifications for individuals to express their preexisting preferences. This bias makes factually inaccurate perceptions regarding support for war relatively immutable once adopted.

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