Clarifying the structure and nature of left-wing authoritarianism.

Abstract

Authoritarianism has been the subject of scientific inquiry for nearly a century, yet the vast majority of authoritarianism research has focused on right-wing authoritarianism. In the present studies, we investigate the nature, structure, and nomological network of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), a construct famously known as "the Loch Ness Monster" of political psychology. We iteratively construct a measure and data-driven conceptualization of LWA across six samples (N = 7,258) and conduct quantitative tests of LWA's relations with over 60 authoritarianism-related variables. We find that LWA, rightwing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation reflect a shared constellation of personality traits, cognitive features, beliefs, and motivational values that might be considered the "heart" of authoritarianism. Still, relative to right-wing authoritarians, left-wing authoritarians were lower in dogmatism and cognitive rigidity, higher in negative emotionality, and expressed stronger support for a political system with substantial centralized state control. Our results also indicate that LWA powerfully predicts behavioral aggression and is strongly correlated with participation in political violence. We conclude that a movement away from exclusively right-wing conceptualizations of authoritarianism may be required to illuminate authoritarianism's central features, conceptual breadth, and psychological appeal.

Attitudes toward civil liberties and rights among politically charged online groups

“…We included both left-wing and right-wing measures of authoritarianism. On one hand, a 39-item scale on Left-Wing Authoritarianism (Likert 1-5; item M = 1.99; SD = 0.61; α = 0.94; Costello, Bowes, Stevens, Waldman, & Lilienfeld, 2021). It measures a 3-factor model: revolutionary aggression (e.g., "political violence can be constructive when it serves the cause of social justice"), top-down censorship (e.g., "when we spend all of our time protecting the right to 'free speech' we're protecting the rights of sexists, racists, and homophobes at the cost of marginalized people"), and anti-conventionalism (e.g., "conservatives are morally inferior to liberals").…”

“…Recent research has gathered evidence of authoritarian dispositions among leftwing voters in populations from the Spanish-speaking context (Fasce & Avendaño, 2020;Avendaño, Fasce, Costello, & Adrián-Ventura, 2021), Europe (Van Hiel, Duriez, & Kossowska, 2006;De Regt, Mortelmans, & Smits, 2011), the United States (Conway, Houck, Gornick, & Repke, 2017;Federico, Fisher, & Deason, 2017;Conway & McFarland, 2019), and worldwide (Conway, Zubrod, Chan, McFarland, & Van de Vliert, 2021), generally with lower prevalence than in the right-wing (Nilsson & Jost, 2020). Recent work by Costello, Bowes, Stevens, Waldman, and Lilienfeld (2021) suggest that left-wing authoritarianism is composed of three factors: Revolutionary aggression-a disposition to violently overthrow and punish the established figures of authority and power; top-down censorship-the motivation to exert group authority to regulate right-wing or deviant ideology and behaviors; and anti-conventionalism-a sense of moral superiority and absolutism, with a corresponding dismissal of conservatives as inherently immoral and a need for ideological homogeneity in one's environment.…”

“…Left-wing authoritarianism is linked to variables that were once thought to be distinguishing marks of right-wing authoritarians, such as low openness, dogmatism, cognitive rigidity, high threat sensitivity, political intolerance, free-speech suppression, social vigilantism, and partisanship (Conway, Houck, Gornick, & Repke, 2017;Conway, Zubrod, Chan, McFarland, & Van de Vliert, 2021;Costello, Bowes, Stevens, Waldman, & Lilienfeld, 2021). Therefore, despite well-documented differences between right-wing and left-wing voters (e.g., Jost 2017), previous research outcomes provide evidence of a relative symmetry in the psychological profiles of far-left and far-right extremists (Crawford, 2012;Conway, Gornick, Houck, Anderson, Stockert, Sessoms, & McCue, 2015;van Prooijen & Krouwel, 2017;Rollwage, Dolan, & Fleming, 2018;Crawford & Brandt, 2020).…”

“…Even though we endorse this potential explanation (i.e., self-defensive endorsement of civil liberties boosted by the perception of power imbalances), we also consider that philosophical analyses of contemporary political ideologies could add explanatory power. Beyond self-defensive cognition, there is a direct and positive relationship between the doctrinal content of economic conservatism and classical liberal values (Johnson & Tamney, 2001;Zumbrunnen & Gangl, 2008, Everett, 2013Fasce & Avendaño, 2020;Costello, Bowes, Stevens, Waldman, & Lilienfeld, 2021)observable even in the misguided association of conservatism-related instances of science denial with vindication of civil liberties (Hornsey, Harris, & Fielding, 2018). At the same time, there are explicitly illiberal conceptions within salient leftist identity politics based on a dialectic between structural oppression and empowerment (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018).…”

Teaching and confronting digital extremism: contexts, challenges and opportunities

“…This tendency is often called “bothsidesism.” For instance, students in my classes have cited property destruction and clashes with law enforcement at US street protests against racial injustice during the summer of 2020 as examples of left-wing violence on par with the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a far-right protestor murdered Activist Heather Heyer. Others have claimed that the nebulous far-left “antifa” movement is just as authoritarian as its stated opponents (Costello et al , 2021 on the political psychology of left-wing authoritarianism). Though there is certainly a long history of political violence associated with far-left extremism and of authoritarianism in self-described leftist governments around the world, the available evidence clearly shows that far-right extremism has had more immediately violent consequences in the contemporary USA: Between 2014 and 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center tallied over 100 people killed or injured by extremists claiming to have been inspired by the “alt-right” (Hankes and Amend, 2018), while one killing has been tied to far-left extremism in the past 25 years (Beckett, 2020).…”