Is the Myth of Left-Wing Authoritarianism Itself a Myth?

Abstract

Is left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) closer to a myth or a reality? Twelve studies test the empirical existence and theoretical relevance of LWA. Study 1 reveals that both conservative and liberal Americans identify a large number of left-wing authoritarians in their lives. In Study 2, participants explicitly rate items from a recently-developed LWA measure as valid measurements of authoritarianism. Studies 3-11 show that persons who score high on this same LWA scale possess the traits associated with models of authoritarianism (while controlling for political ideology): LWA is positively related to threat sensitivity across multiple areas, including general ecological threats (Study 3), COVID disease threat (Study 4), Belief in a Dangerous World (Study 5), and Trump threat (Study 6). Further, controlling for ideology, high-LWA persons show more support for restrictive political correctness norms (Study 7), rate African-Americans and Jews more negatively (Studies 8-9), and show more domain-specific dogmatism and attitude strength (Study 10). Study 11 reveals that the majority of the effects from Studies 3-10 hold when looking only within liberals, thus revealing these effects are about liberal authoritarianism. Study 12 uses the World Values Survey to provide evidence of Left-Wing Authoritarianism around the globe. Taken in total, this large array of triangulating evidence from 12 studies comprised of over 8,000 participants from the U.S. and over 66,000 participants world-wide strongly suggests that left-wing authoritarianism is much closer to a reality than a myth.

The curious case of left‐wing authoritarianism: When authoritarian persons meet anti‐authoritarian norms

“…Historically, many researchers have argued for the possibility of left-wing authoritarianism (e.g., Eysenck, 1954;Mullen et al, 2003;Ray, 1983;Rokeach, 1960;Shils, 1954), and burgeoning evidence spanning multiple nations and three continents validates many of these conceptual arguments Conway & McFarland, 2019;Conway et al, in press;Costello et al, 2020a;Conway et al, 2020b;De Regt, Mortelmans, & Smits, 2011;Fasce & Avendaño, 2020;Federico et al, 2017;McFarland et al, 1992McFarland et al, , 1993McFarland et al, , 1996Pentony et al, 2000;Todosijević, 2005;Todosijević & Enyedi, 2008;Van Hiel et al, 2006;Wronski et al, 2018). This evidence for LWA can be roughly grouped into two source types.…”

Attitudes toward civil liberties and rights among politically charged online groups

“…This intriguing view captures a potential phenomenon that has been regarded as a "reactionary drift" within the left wing (Ovejero, 2018;Babones, 2018;Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018), which would be characterized by increasing abandon of public reason, open deliberation, and liberal values, preferring instead a rather paradoxical endorsement of illiberal identity politics (Strauts & Blanton, 2015;Clayton, 2018;Conway, Zubrod, Chan, McFarland, & Van de Vliert, 2021). This reactionary drift would be explicit in recent incidents in which left-wing activists, counting on political and institutional support, have exerted repressive actions of censorship (e.g., The Atlantic, 2015; The New York Times, 2017; CBC News, 2017;Inside Higher Ed, 2019), often exhibiting violent behaviors (e.g., CNN, 2017;Fox News, 2020)-also in the Spanish-speaking context (e.g., Clarín, 2017;El Mundo, 2019;La Vanguardia, 2019).…”

“…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).…”

Grievance, ideology and prejudice: On the tripartite nature of identity politics and its relation to left-wing authoritarianism

“…Since the seminal work of Altemeyer (1981), authoritarianism had been conceptualized as an eminently right-wing construct reflecting an aggressive form of social conventionalism, based on the imposition of moral and social imperatives (Feldman, 2003). Nevertheless, the study of left-wing authoritarianism is gaining momentum (e.g., Conway, Houck, Gornick, & Repke, 2017;Fasce & Avendaño, 2020;Conway, Zubrod, Chan, McFarland, & Van de Vliert, 2021). In fact, Costello, Bowes, Stevens, Waldman, and Lilienfeld (2021) have advanced a domain-specific measurement of left-wing authoritarianism, which concluded that the construct is composed of three dimensions-all of them, in our view, potentially predicted by endorsement of leftist identity politics: 1) Revolutionary aggression: A disposition to violently overthrow and punish the established figures of authority or power.…”