Collective Rights and Personal Freedoms: A Discursive Analysis of Participant Accounts of Authoritarianism

Abstract

This article presents a discursive analysis of participant accounts of authoritarianism, with the aim of understanding how participants construct accounts about authority, when, and for what purposes. Participants completed a 30‐item Right‐Wing Authoritarianism scale and were then interviewed about how they went about this task. Analyses revealed that, despite an overall consistency when answering items on an authoritarianism scale, participants in this study did not consistently choose to produce authoritarian responses in contrast to the nonauthoritarian alternative. Instead, the construction and expression of authoritarian ideas was found to be directly related to two rhetorical features of conversing about authoritarianism: (1) the ideological dilemma of society versus individual and (2) the mobilization of arguments about social and personal threat that allowed participants to construct accounts about collective rights or personal freedoms. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for current debates about how authoritarianism should be theorized and studied.

The rhetorical complexity of competitive and common victimhood in conversational discourse

“…Again, a participant with ‘strong views’ about the monarchy can both support and contest such a structure (Billig, ). More recently, variability has been studied in relation to issues as diverse as the expression of gender as a presentation of self (Wetherell & Edley, ), authoritarian and non‐authoritarian responses to questions about right‐wing authoritarianism (Gray & Durrheim, ), and clinical psychologists' constructions of mental health (Lofgren, Hewitt, & das Nair, ). Furthermore, in political discourse in Northern Ireland, speakers have been found to vary their claims of being a minority or majority depending on the context (Stevenson, Condor, & Abell, ).…”

Construcción y evidencias de validez de una escala abreviada de autoinforme para evaluar el autoritarismo

“…Actualmente, el instrumento cuenta con versiones adaptadas en diversos países, como Chile (Cárdenas & Parra, 2011), España (Seoane & Garzón, 1991), Suecia (Zakrisson, 2005), Rusia (McFarland, Ageyev & Abalakina-Paap, 1992) y África del Sur (Duckitt, 1993), por citar algunos; y la escala tiene como mérito ser "la primera técnica moderna de medición psicológica aplicada al concepto" (Dusso, 2017, p. 244), siendo, tal vez, la más empleada en estudios del área (Dunwoody & Funke, 2016). Además de esto, el instrumento ha sido bastante eficaz en el pronóstico tanto en estudios de la esfera social como política, así como en el estudio de actitudes de restricción a determinados grupos y minorías, y de la aceptación de tiranías gubernamentales (Gray & Durrheim, 2013).…”