Authoritarianism?With or Without Threat?

Abstract

The Authoritarian Dynamic. By Karen Stenner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 392 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-82743-4), $29.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-53478-X). Instead of inaugurating the prophesied “end of history” and the triumph of capitalist liberal democracy (Fukuyama 1992), the opening years of the twenty-first century have brought back some of the worst features of its predecessor. Internationally, genocide has ignited on several blurred frontiers where different religions mingle. US armed forces are bogged down in an endless and divisive Asian land war, and the head of an embattled Asian country has announced the failure of democracy and “increasing global hatred.” In the US domestic arena, a president has eavesdropped on US citizens without getting the required court approval, and a cultural divide has opened up over the issue of immigration. Given all this, it is fitting that social scientists are continuing to develop one of the most venerable psychological variables of the twentieth century—authoritarianism—to explain the situations in which we find ourselves. Theodor Adorno et al. (1950) originally developed the concept of authoritarianism, fusing psychoanalytic and Frankfurt School critical theory with US survey research technology, in order to explain anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Their resulting F -scale measure of authoritarianism has proven to be extraordinarily useful in understanding prejudice, oppression, and aggression based on many different demographic dimensions. In recent years, Bob Altemeyer (1981, 1988, 1996) simplified the theory and refurbished the psychometric credentials of the F -scale, renaming it “right-wing authoritarianism.” In The Authoritarian Dynamic , Karen Stenner has elaborated on her earlier work with Stanley Feldman (Feldman and Stenner 1997) to create a comprehensive new theory and measure of authoritarianism that is intended to explain shifting levels and relationships of public opinion in the United States as well as other advanced industrial countries. Stenner believes that a “hopeless tautology” (pp. 54, 72) exists between the F -scale and the right-wing-authoritarian measures and the variables they are supposed …