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

Abstract

Research on left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) is still scarce in German-speaking coun-tries as a valid self-report measure is currently missing. The present research closes this gap by adapting the Left-Wing-Authoritarianism-Index (LWAI) from English and Span-ish into German (LWAI-G), testing its psychometric properties, and investigating its va-lidity considering the recently proposed dark-ego-vehicle principle (DEVP). For the pre-sent research, we applied the LWAI-G in a convenience sample from German-speaking countries (N = 388) and representative samples from Germany (N = 2,048), Austria (N = 837), and the German-speaking part of Switzerland (N = 826). Results showed that the LWAI-G demonstrates adequate psychometric properties, but only for the 13-item version of the LWAI-G the expected first-order factor structure with the three correlated LWA factors (antihierarchical aggression, anticonventionalism, and top-down censorship) emerged. Results further evidence the validity of the LWAI-G, particularly regarding spe-cific dark personality traits (e.g., narcissism, psychopathy).