The influence of authoritarianism and outgroup threat on political affiliations and support for antidemocratic policies.

Abstract

An understanding of contemporary U.S. politics requires an understanding of authoritarianism and perceptions of outgroup threat. Previous research suggests that the threat of terrorism and growing authoritarianism within the Republican Party help to explain Donald Trump’s electoral victory (Hetherington & Weiler, 2009; MacWilliams, 2016). We replicated and extended previous findings through the use of 2 surveys completed by 704 participants and found that those higher in authoritarianism were more conservative, more Republican, more likely to support Trump, and more likely to perceive Mexicans and Muslims as threatening. In addition, we found that those high in authoritarianism and outgroup threat perception were more likely to support antidemocratic policies targeting outgroups (such as implementing a Muslim registry and profiling Mexicans) and to abandon the rule of law by postponing elections and fast-tracking the deportation of illegal immigrants. Together, authoritarianism and outgroup threat accounted for about half of the variance in support for Trump and in support for these antidemocratic policies. We found that while perceptions of outgroup threat explain more unique variance for implicitly antidemocratic policies (those where the public might not realize that the policies violated democratic norms), authoritarianism explained more unique variance in support of more explicitly antidemocratic policies (those where the public knew the policies were unconstitutional). Finally, we demonstrated that Altemeyer’s (1981) original conception of authoritarianism as consisting of 3 distinct components (aggression, submission, and conventionalism) is a powerful tool for understanding contemporary U.S. political attitudes and that aggression had the biggest influence on support for antidemocratic policies targeting outgroups.

Ideology before party: Social dominance orientation and right‐wing authoritarianism temporally precede political party support

“…With regard to political outcomes, the motivational bases of SDO and RWA should draw people towards political parties (and policies) that, respectively, bolster group-based inequalities and manage threats to traditional norms and group cohesion (Duckitt & Sibley, 2009). Consistent with this thesis, SDO and RWA correlate positively with support for conservative/right-wing policies (i.e., policies that promote group cohesion and/or are hierarchy enhancing) and political parties (Azevedo, Jost, Rothmund, & Sterling, 2019;Choma & Hanoch, 2017;Crawford & Pilanski, 2014;Duckitt & Sibley, 2016;Dunwoody & Plane, 2019;Liu, Huang, & McFedries, 2008;Perry & Sibley, 2013;Sibley & Wilson, 2007;Van Assche, Dhont, & Pettigrew, 2019). Furthermore, experimental research shows that RWA and SDO predict political candidate support more strongly when those candidates frame their policy positions in terms of threats to social cohesion and group status, respectively (Crawford, Bradya, Pilanskia, & Ernya, 2013).…”

Ideological measurement in social and political psychology

“…Nonetheless, higher scores on such ostensibly ideologically neutral measures are still correlated with preferences for right-wing or conservative candidates (Duckitt, Bizumic, Krauss, & Heled, 2010;Dunwoody & Funke, 2016, Dunwoody & Plane, 2019Ludeke, Klitgaard, & Vitriol, 2018), with coefficients being around the same as those observed with traditional measures of RWA (Nilsson & Jost, 2020). This does pose a potential issue for the argument that ideological asymmetries are related to inherent political content embedded within scales.…”

Neoliberal managed care and the changing nature of social work practice

“…ASC is comprised of three subscales: (1) authoritarian submission; (2) authoritarian aggression; and (3) conventionalism. The ASC can be used as a single measure (Dunwoody and McFarland, 2018) or as subscales (Dunwoody and Plane, 2019). Overall scale reliability (Cronbach alpha = .80 to .86), and subscale reliability have been reported at acceptable levels (Dunwoody and Funke, 2018).…”