Investigating right wing authoritarianism with a very short authoritarianism scale

Boris Bizumic,John Duckitt

doi:10.5964/jspp.v6i1.835

Abstract

Authoritarianism has been an important explanatory concept for more than 60 years and a powerful predictor of social, political, and intergroup attitudes and behaviour. An important impediment to research on authoritarianism has been the length of the measures available, particularly with the contemporary emphasis on the need for social research to use larger, more representative samples and measure multiple constructs across multiple domains. We therefore developed a six-item Very Short Authoritarianism (VSA) scale that equally represented the three content subdimensions and two directions of wording of Altemeyer’s widely used Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale. Over four samples (N = 1,601) from three countries the VSA scale showed satisfactory internal consistency and the expected hierarchical factor structure with three primary factors loading on a single higher-order factor. Additionally, the scale predicted variables such as nationalism, ethnocentrism, political orientation, political party/candidate support, attitudes towards ingroups or outgroups and anti-minority bias at moderate to strong levels with effects very close to those obtained for much longer established measures of RWA (including Altemeyer’s scale). The VSA scale also showed clearly better reliability and validity than a short measure of authoritarian parental values that has been used to measure authoritarianism.

Highlights

Authoritarianism has been an important explanatory concept for more than 60 years and a powerful predictor of social, political, and intergroup attitudes and behaviour
By selecting the one protrait and one contrait item from each of the three ACT subdimensions that best predicted the total ACT score we ensured that the six-item Very Short Authoritarianism (VSA) scale represented all the three primary content dimensions of authoritarianism as well as was fully balanced to control direction of wording effects
The internal consistency of the VSA scale as indexed by the mean inter-item correlation was marginally higher than that of the ACT scale (.31 versus .26), suggesting that the lower alpha was due to it having fewer items

Summary

Introduction

Authoritarianism has been an important explanatory concept for more than 60 years and a powerful predictor of social, political, and intergroup attitudes and behaviour. An important observation of Altemeyer’s (1981) was that the items of his RWA scale encompassed three distinct content areas, that is, Authoritarian Submission, Authoritarian Aggression, and Conventionalism (see Mavor, Louis, & Sibley, 2010). Because he viewed these three facets as strongly intercorrelated and forming a single dimension he did not measure them separately and the items of his RWA scale typically expressed in their content two or even three of these facets. Several three-dimensional RWA scales have been developed (see, e.g., Funke, 2005; Mavor, Wilson, Sibley, & Louis, 2012), the best researched of these to date has been the Authoritarianism (or Authoritarian Aggression), Conservatism (or Authoritarian Submission), Traditionalism (or Conventionalism) (ACT) scale (Duckitt & Bizumic, 2013; Duckitt, Bizumic, Krauss, & Heled, 2010)

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