The construct was developed empirically by Canadian researcher Robert Altemeyer, who started by examining the more elaborate, Freudian-based construct presented in The Authoritarian Personality, which contained nine factors. The three factors Altemeyer identified were among the original nine factors, but he refined the questions defining the traits over time, developing a scale over time with stronger inter-item correlation.  His findings are based primarily on research using questionnaires administered to his students, and secondarily to parents, but they have been administered to others as well, including members of a large number of American state legislatures. His uses standard correlation analysis, as well as comparisons and analysis focusing on those who score in the upper 25%, termed "High RWAs" or simply "Highs."

Altemeyer explains that "right-wing'" means a "psychological sense of submitting to perceived authorities in one's life," and is not identified with a specific political ideology.  In the Soviet Union, "right-wing" meant a sense of submitting to communist authorities, and Altemeyer presented research showing this was so.  This is what his RWA (right-wing authoritarianism) scale measured. It is obviously related to the perpetuation of hierarchy, and the use of force to impose "order."

Altemeyer's third book, The Authoritarian Specter reports and discusses Altemeyer's extensive findings in considerable detail. He makes it quite clear that RWA explains statistical group tendencies, not individual behavior, and that environmental factors--such as being in a frightening emergency situation, like the United States just after 9-11--are far more powerful than attitude in predicting behavior.

Thus, he's in no way trying to prejudge, stereotype and dismiss those who may be more conservative, or to praise those who are more liberal.  Altemeyer himself scores about average on the RWA scale.

A Quick And Dirty Guide To RWA

Nonetheless, the group portrait of RWA is distinctly disturbing, as can be seen from the list of tendencies that Altemeyer compiled and listed at the end of The Authoritarian Specter as a sort of compressed summary.  I've listed most of them in the tables that follow here, which provide some thematic coherence for them.  The first is the one that goes most directly to the issue at hand--conservative identity politics, which is built around the "good us"/"demonized them" dynamic.

These items show broad and robust evidence of hostility toward designated outgroups.  There's also evidence of contempt, inability and unwillingness to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.  Systematically misunderstanding others is second nature with this sort of outlook, and is clearly related to the dynamics of an identity politics defined in opposition to groups of demonized others.  The actual interior experience of others is something that such a mindset simply cannot dare to seriously consider.  It is simply presumed to be "evil."

On the flip side, are the tendencies toward their group identity cohesion.

The items in this table can be fairly be summarized as manifestations of tribalism: group cohesiveness and `loyalty' are core values, religion serves the purpose of tribal unity and self-justification, sex roles keep people in their place, and leaders are to be trusted and obeyed, no matter what. Tibalism and cultism are clearly closely related, as will be discussed more fully in a future post. This is a strong indication that the cultism surrounding Bush is indeed consistent with conservatism, rather than a departure from it, as Greenwald assumed in his post that sparked this series in the first place.  Here I am showing that it is consistent with attitudinal underpinnings.  But those attitudes clearly translate into overt ideology and policies positions as well.

Related to such the fragile and unsupportable cartoon picture of the world shown in Table 1 (and less directly in Table 2) is a wide range flawed reasoning as well.

One logical flaw which reflects both on misunderstanding of others and themselves, is RWAs elevated tendency to commit what's called the "Fundamental Attribution Error" (FAE)--over-explaining others' actions in terms of personalities and under-explaining them in terms of situational factors.  This what lies behind uncritically trusting people who tell them what they want to hear--they believe what the person is saying is a true expression of how they feel, and ignore the contextual evidence that they are simply pandering. This also helps to explain why they trust unscrupulous leaders, such as Nixon and Bush.

As for self-knowledge, although RWAs have a number of character flaws consistent with group identity politics generally and religious fundamentalism [already mentioned] specifically--see Table 4--they're remarkably blind to their own failings--see Table 5.

The cumulative picture summarized in these five tables is clearly that of people who have a multifacted set of tendencies that work together to foster a conformist group identity that is maintained in part by demonizing others, and expresses itself in a propensity, or at least tolerance for violence.

Last, we turn to the more specifically political tendencies, some of which have been mentioned before, but are included here for the sake of completeness

Three Broad Findings To Consider

I want to conclude this analyses by stressing three broad findings in addition to what's gone before.

First, concerning RWA and fear:  Among the most significant of Altemeyer's findings--both implicit and explicit in what we've seen above--was the fearful nature of the RWA worldview, "High RWAs stand about ten steps closer to the panic button than the rest of the population," he concluded, "They see the world as a more dangerous place than most others do, with civilization on the verge of collapse and the world of Mad Max looming just beyond."  This fearfulness is a good explanation for many of the tendencies listed above.

Second, concerning RWA and religion: The authoritarian relationship to religion is particularly troubling, as several different sorts of flaws tend to work together to blind authoritarians from seeing what they are doing.  Perhaps most striking is the greater likelihood to compartmentalize their thinking, and not notice contradictions between compartmentalized beliefs.  In a 1985 experiment, students were asked what they thought about two passages from the Gospels: "Do not judge, that you may not be judged.  For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged. (Matthew 7:1), and "Let he who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her."  Altemeyer reports:

Such compartmentalization also reflects problems with self-knowledge, already noted.  Of course, it's relatively easy for one religious group to see such flaws in another group.  The really hard thing is to see it in yourself or in your group.  It's much, much easier for fundmentalists in different religions to inflame their followers against each other--and to put pressure on their more moderate co-religionists to join them.  Naturally, this feeds into a number of different tendencies listed above.

Third,concerning RWA and politics:  Altmeyer found that RWA becomes increasingly significant the more involved one is politically. Surprisingly, Altemeyer found that RWA only correlated modestly with party identification in Canada and America.  It was always higher with the more conservative party (a 3-way comparison in most Canadian cases), but the differences were relatively modest.  However, when he looked at how people perceived their elected representatives, the degrees of difference increased significantly.   Then, when he looked at the representatives themselves, he discovered that they differed even more than their constituents thought they did.

In additional to Canada, he examined a large number of state legislatures in the United States.  While a there were a few Democrats who scored very high on the RWA scale, the Republican Party as a whole scored dramatically higher on the scale, and showed far less variation than the Democrats did.  Republicans in state government in every part of the country scored much closer to one another than did Democrats. In addition, the spectrum of American politics was higher on the RWA scale than the Canadian spectrum.  That's not to say there was no overlap, but the difference was striking, nonetheless.

These findings strongly suggest that RWA reflects something very fundamental about American politics, which cannot simply be overcome by wishing it away.  It must be faced head-on and dealt with at a very fundamental level.  Conservatives and the GOP are more unified, because they see the world more similarly--albeit not more accurately.  It seems only logical to assume that this both reflects and reinforces the basic fact that their foundation is a form of identity politics, an expression of a shared identity, as opposed to the Democratic Party, which is openly and avowedly a coalition.

What About Leftwing Authoritarianism?

Altemeyer went looking for it.  He didn't find it.  He didn't find anyone who scored over 50% on the LWA scale he developed, which was a direct reflection of the RWA scale. In contrast, he has found numerous people scoring close 100% on the RWA scale.  He concluded that LWAs are "as rare as hen's teeth."  He did, of course, find authoritarianism among people on the left in the Soviet Union, as noted above.  But this was due to their social conformity to the existing authorities in their society.  And that's what RWA is.

What's Next: SDO

The next installment in this series concerns another attitudinal construct, known as social dominance orientation (SDO).  As we shall see, it is even more directly associated with group identity.

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The underlying material in this diary comes from Robert Altemeyer's third and most comprehensive book, The Authoritarian Specter

Previous posts in this series:
Conservatism As Identity Politics--Intro
Conservatism As Identity Politics--Pt2: Hard Core Data