Development and Initial Validation of Two Brief Measures of Left-Wing Authoritarianism: A Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

Although authoritarianism has predominantly been studied among political conservatives, authoritarian individuals exist on both "poles" of the political spectrum. A 39-item multidimensional measure of left-wing authoritarianism, the Left-wing Authoritarianism Index, was recently developed to extend the study of authoritarianism to members of the far-left. The present study coupled a fully automated machine learning approach (i.e., a genetic algorithm) with multidimensional item response theory in a large, demographically representative American sample (N = 834) to generate and evaluate two abbreviated versions of the Left-wing Authoritarianism Index. We subsequently used a second community sample (N = 477) to conduct extensive validational tests of the abbreviated measures, which comprise 25-and 13items. The abbreviated forms demonstrated remarkable convergence with the full LWA Index in terms of their psychometric (e.g., internal consistency) and distributional (e.g., mean, standard deviation, skew, kurtosis) properties. Further, this convergence extended to virtually identical cross-measure patterns of correlations with 14 external criteria, including need for chaos, political violence, anomia, low institutional trust. In light of these results, the LWA-25 and LWA-13 scales appeared to function effectively as measures of LWA.

Shining the Light on Left-Wing Authoritarianism in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland

“…One reason for this imbalance may be the fact that a sound psychometric self-report measure for LWA in German is missing. Hence, the present research aimed at providing such a measure for German-speaking individuals by adapting the LWAI from English (Costello et al, 2022;Costello & Patrick, 2023) and Spanish (Avendaño et al, 2022). For this purpose, the LWAI was translated from English and Spanish into German.…”

“…Thus, the inverse LWAI-G items may potentially have created an independent method factor which obscured the dimensionality of the latent LWA subscales and expressed itself in the poorer model fits of the longer LWAI-G versions. Yet, despite the inclusion of the inverse items, previous studies found all three versions of the LWAI (i.e., the 39-, the 25-, and the 13-item version) to demonstrate excellent fit indices for the ESEM models in Englishspeaking samples (Costello et al, 2022;Costello & Patrick, 2023) as well as in Spanishspeaking individuals (Avendaño et al, 2022).…”

“…The LWAI-G was created in the following steps: First, the 39 items of the original LWAI (Costello et al, 2022;Costello & Patrick, 2023) were translated from English into German by two native German speakers with proficiency level in English. Simultaneously, the Spanish version (Avendaño et al, 2022) was also translated into German by a native German speaker with a proficiency level in Spanish living in Mexico.…”

“…Based on the results of previous research regarding the LWAI (Avendaño et al, 2022;Costello et al, 2022;Costello & Patrick, 2023), we first tested if the three-factor structure found in the original LWAI (i.e., antihierarchical aggression, anticonventionalism, and topdown censorship) also satisfactorily explains the factor structure of the LWAI-G. For this purpose, we replicated the procedure employed by Costello et al (2022) who conducted CFA as well as ESEM (cf. van Zyl & ten Klooster, 2022).…”

Racial microaggressions: Identifying factors affecting perceived severity and exploring strategies to reduce harm

“…Another limitation in the current study concerns our use of a bespoke measure of political orientation. To more fully interpret our work in relation to the broader literature, future studies should consider using previously measures such as the recently developed progressive values scale (Proulx et al, 2023), as well as more established measures of intergroup orientation such as the social dominance orientation scale (Pratto et al, 1994), right-wing authoritarianism scale (Altemeyer, 1983), and the more recent left-wing authoritarianism index (Altemeyer, 1996;Costello & Patrick, 2023).…”