Examining change in social dominance and authoritarianism during New Zealand's nationwide COVID‐19 lockdown

Abstract

We investigated mean‐level changes in social dominance orientation (SDO) and right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA) during (vs before) New Zealand's nationwide coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) lockdown at a time when New Zealand was led by a left‐leaning government. The number of participants in the study ranged from (Ns = 24,065–24,653). Using propensity score matching to approximate experimental conditions, results show that both ideological motivations decreased slightly during the lockdown but rebounded after restrictions were removed several months later. We also tested whether the lockdown differentially moderated the associations SDO and RWA had with institutional attitudes. Lockdown conditions exacerbated the negative association between SDO and government satistfaction but attenuated the negative association between RWA and government satisfaction. Similar patterns emerged for trust in police and politicians but not trust in science. Although SDO and RWA fluctuated in similar directions during New Zealand's nationwide lockdown, our results indicate that people high in RWA may become more supportive of the government and police under such conditions—even in countries with a left‐leaning political leader helming the pandemic response.

The limited impact of adverse experiences on worldviews and ideologies

“…It is not possible to say that any experience will not be associated with worldviews and ideologies based on our results though. For instance, it has already been shown that events such as the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (Bonanno and Jost, 2006), terrorist attacks against railways in Madrid (Echebarria-Echabe and Fernández-Guede, 2006), the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic (Azevedo et al, 2023;Zubielevitch et al, 2023), and even national elections changing the political party in power (Liu et al, 2008;Vilanova et al, 2019) significantly change worldviews and ideologies. These events have in common the fact that they are collective, contrary to the experiences we assessed, which are individual.…”