Right-Wing Authoritarianism

William Andrews was a librarian at Runnymede Public Library, Toronto.

The tendency to submit arbitrarily to excessive governmental and other social injustice, even tyranny, in Western democracies is the subject of Bob Altemeyer’s first book in social psychology. Altemeyer is a member of the Psychology Department of the University of Manitoba. It is his belief that such “right-wing authoritarianism” is widespread in North America and other democracies. This book is an analysis of research into authoritarianism, with suggestions for improvement and a new definition of the phenomenon.

Professor Altemeyer first analyses research into authoritarianism, starting with the development of the F (for Fascism) Scale by a “multi-disciplinary team” at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1940s and continuing with other research into the late 1970s. He concludes that “conceptualizations have been very casually constructed” giving rise to muddled thinking and poor investigation. Psychometric scales have been developed with too low reliability and consequently research done with these scales has been “deficient methodologically” with many “disturbing omissions.” The author complains that too many one-shot, unreplicated studies are reported. The response set issue is examined, with the conclusion that response sets can have powerful effects on scores in attitude surveys.

In the second section, the author develops his own concept of authoritarianism, which he calls the “Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale.” This scale is comprised of three “attitudinal clusters”: authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism. This scale was elaborated and tested over twelve years of research that led the author to conclude that the RWA scale was “tighter than previous efforts, more clearly defined, and more clearly delimited.” Altemeyer compares his own scale with five other scales: the original F Scale, the Dogmatism Scale, the Conservative Scale, the Balanced F Scale, and the Authoritarian-Rebellion Scale, over several criteria: unidimensionality, relationship with various authoritarian dispositions and behaviors, etc. The author’s pitting experiments, not previously published, established the predictive superiority of the RWA scale over the other scales, especially in subjects with a strong interest in politics on those still religiously inclined. The RWA scale was also tested over the dynamics and several co-variants of authoritarianism with good results.

In the final section of the book the author compares a social learning theory of RWA with the original Freudian theory advanced at Berkeley. The author has guarded optimism because the former theory “does seem to generate testable hypotheses.” The appendixes list all the questions used in the various scales the author has tested and analysed.

The book is better written than the average textbook in psychology. The author seems free of political bias — “the construct I am advancing is called ‘right-wing’ authoritarianism because the submission is to established authority.” While the book has been written for the professional and the student, the interested layman with a reasonable knowledge of statistics should find it interesting.