Long-term influences of childhood history and educational level on authoritarianism.

Abstract

This study on authoritarianism is based on a survey of 900 respondents recruited originally to investigate the long-term effects of wartime evacuation on children from the County of Kent in England during World War II (Rusby, 2005). Following the psychoanalytic premise of Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950) this sample was used to test whether this childhood experience of apparent rejection by parents might be associated with scores on the F-scale and its nine subscales measured 50 years later. Variables related to home upbringing and the life course were included in the univariate and structural modeling analyses. The main effect of evacuation found was an inverse relationship with authoritarianism for males with the number of billets occupied. Females who had experienced a strict home upbringing had significantly higher scores on certain subscales. The analyses found a highly significant inverse relationship between the F-scale mean, and all nine subscales, with level of education. This contribution of the subsyndromes to authoritarianism was confirmed by factor analysis. The implications of the results for the psychoanalytic premise of authoritarianism are discussed.