B.A. Degree Final Thesis: The Authoritarians. A study of politics and psychology (original) (raw)
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Authoritarian Pers - Intn'l Encyclop of Social & Behav Sciences - 2015.pdf
The theory of an authoritarian personality was an influential though controversial mid-twentieth-century theory to explain the mass appeal of fascism and ethnocentrism. Methodological and conceptual criticisms of the original theory, however, lead to alternative theories and culminated in research suggesting two distinct dimensions of ideological attitudes, Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) or Social Conservatism and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) or Anti-Egalitarianism. RWA and SDO were initially thought to be direct expressions of two different authoritarian personalities, but have more recently been seen as describing social or ideological attitude dimensions with multiple social and personal determinants.
National Social Science Journal, 2014
The present research attempts to replicate and extend Altemeyer’s (1996) research on left-wing authoritarianism. Two hundred and twenty participants completed the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (Altemeyer, 1996), Left-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (Altemeyer, 1996) Attitudes Toward Violence Scale (ATVS; Anderson, Benjamin, Wood, & Bonacci, 2006), the Need for Cognition Scale (Cacioppo, Petty, & Kao, 1984), and the Consideration for Future Consequences Scale (Strathman, Gleicher, Boninger, & Edwards, 1994). The results largely replicated Altemeyer’s (1996) research. The results showed no evidence of high scorers on the LWA Scale. Furthermore, the results confirmed Altemeyer’s typology of authoritarian styles, demonstrating that right-wingers and wild-card authoritarians tend to score higher on measures of authoritarian aggression and lower on at least one measure of epistemic closure relative to non-authoritarians and left-wingers.
Johannes Kieding Eng. 101 Informational Essay 2008 On "The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power" by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad
Fruits of Fear, Seeds of Terror: The Political Implications of Psychological Authoritarianism
Fruits of Fear, Seeds of Terror: The Political Implications of Psychological Authoritarianism, 2005
This dissertation answers the question: “What is psychological authoritarianism?” It examines over eighty years of research on psychological authoritarianism, with special emphasis on Adomo et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality and Robert Altemeyer’s work on “right-wing authoritarianism”. It explains why Adomo et al. developed the theoretical framework underlying the F Scale, and how it undergirds Altemeyer’s much more recent and methodologically sophisticated work on the RWA Scale. Both Adomo et al. and Altemeyer understand psychological authoritarianism as the commonalty of three dimensions: authoritarian aggression, conventionality, and authoritarian submission. The dissertation argues that their data indicate that “authoritarian aggression” constitutes the central dimension of “general” psychological authoritarianism, independent of specific ideological leanings. It concludes that psychological authoritarian is authoritarian aggression, nothing more, nothing less. The dissertation rebuts the claim that psychological authoritarianism and conservatism are the same phenomenon. Wilson et al.’s C Scale is the most influential measure of conservatism. Their formulation of “psychological conservatism” parallels key features of Adomo et al.’s theory. Measures of “authoritarianism” relate well to “conservatism” because they are conceptualized and operationalized in similar ways. However, sixty years of empirical findings strongly suggest that these are related but different phenomena. Jost et al.’s efforts to “explain” “revolutionary conservatism” highlight the intellectual contradictions that arise when the two are conflated. The work identifies their common characteristics, and also why they are different. It also provides detailed arguments for why they should be conceptualized as related but distinct attitudes. This dissertation is an exercise in “conceptual clarification” via “psychometrical hermeneutics”. This entails evaluating the degree to which attitudinal phenomena measured by scales correspond to the concepts being operationalized via the careful examination of scale attributes and item wordings. “Psychometrical hermeneutics” also constructs reconceptualizations where the measured phenomenon and concept diverge. This work argues that, in many instances, discrepancies between the conceptualizations underlying scales and the psychometric implications of their operationalizations resulted in conceptual confusion that prevented scholars from properly understanding psychological authoritarianism for much of the past half century.
Theoretical and methodological foundations of the authoritarian personality
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1993
This article provides a history of the theoretical and methodological contributions, particularly Erich Fromm's, of the sub-syndromes of the concept of authoritarianism and the relationship of his work to the classical study by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford.
The Authoritarian Personality and Its Discontents
Over a year after the election of Donald Trump, countless comparisons have been made between our populist moment and the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in twentieth-century Europe. Placing even greater stress on this tenuous analogy, many of Trump’s critics have turned to analysis of these phenomena by German-Jewish émigré intellectuals, notably Hannah Arendt and members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. In this flurry of citation, critics have tended to elide deep rifts between these German traditions, even as the theories invoked in fact support two distinct and opposing interpretations. The first of these we might call the anti-tyranny camp (a darling of liberal publications) the faces of which are the historian Timothy Snyder (Yale University) and his theorist of choice, Hannah Arendt. The alternative is what we might call the anti-capitalist camp. It is here we find the Frankfurt School, which brings together an analysis of fascism with anti-capitalist critique. Conflicting temporalities underlie these divergent approaches: anti-tyrannists characterize Trump as a historical rupture, a deviation from history as usual, while for anti-capitalists he is a historical continuity, a product of history as usual. I will make the case that it is the latter tradition, as distinct from an Arendtian fixation on totalitarianism, that best articulates a critical synthesis of historical precedent and contemporary threat.