Right-Wing Authoritarianism

374 Pages·1981·17.803 MB·english

by  Bob Altemeyer

TRENT UNIVERSITY
ALUMNI BOOK FUND
This book is a gift of
TRENT UNIVERSITY
ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
as part of the Book Fund
of the Trent University
Alumni Association
Presented on
August 17 , 19 82
to The Thomas J. Bata Library
Trent University,
Peterborough, Canada.

Digitized by the Internet Archive
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RIGHT-WING AUTHORITARIANISM
All of us submit to established authority to some extent, but are many of
us astonishingly accepting of governmental injustice and tyranny? All of
us are sometimes aggressive, but do some of us seethe with a self-righteous
hostility waiting to be licenced? All of us follow social conventions, but
do some of us sanctify our notion of conventionality as though it were
the only defense against catastrophe? And do these things occur together
in many people?
Is there a broadly based right-wing authoritarianism in many western
democracies that supports unjust and unwise wars, that despises pro¬
test and dissent, that believes the unbelievable because high officials
have said so, that longs for authorities to “crack down on the deviants,”
that does not care how many times the government breaks the law, that
when marshalled can determine elections and pass repressive laws, and
that, by its sheer numbers, continually invites dictatorship? It is the
thesis of this book that the answer to all these questions is yes.
Professor Altemeyer begins by closely examining the scientific litera¬
ture on right-wing authoritarianism. He argues that, because of vague
conceptualizations and poorly developed measures, many earlier
approaches were doomed to failure.
In the second part of the volume, the author describes his previously
unpublished twelve-year research program on right-wing authoritarian¬
ism. The construct is defined as the covariation of three attitudinal
clusters —authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and con¬
ventionalism—and it is operationally determined by the score on an
attitude measure, the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale. The author
describes a large pitting experiment which established the psychometric
and predictive advantages of the RWA Scale over its predecessors. A
number of studies of the covariates and dynamics of authoritarianism
then investigated the way in which the construct interacts with other
variables in determining behavior.
In the final section, the author presents a social learning theory of the
origins of right-wing authoritarianism which he compares with the psycho¬
analytic theory advanced thirty years ago in The Authoritarian Personality.
This timely volume surveys the history of social psychological
research on right-wing authoritarianism and describes a more fruitful
direction for future work. It concludes with a disturbing comment on the
pervasiveness of authoritarian behavior in our society.
Bob Altemeyer is a graduate of Yale University and Carnegie-Mellon
University. He is a member of the Psychology Department of the
University of Manitoba.

Right-Wing
Authoritarianism
BOB ALTEMEYER
THE UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA PRESS

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
1 A critique of previous social psychological
research on right-wing authoritarianism 13
2 The response set issue 117
3 A suggested conceptualization of
right-wing authoritarianism 147
4 A test of the construct validity of the RWA
and five other authoritarianism scales 175
5 Explorations of the dynamics and covariates
of right-wing authoritarianism 215
6 Some exploratory findings on the origins
of right-wing authoritarianism 253
Epilog 273
Appendixes 277
Notes 309
References 331
Index 349