Authoritarian Ideology Research Articles

Swedish Catholicism and Authoritarian Ideologies: Attitudes to Communism, National Socialism, Fascism, and Authoritarian Conservatism in a Swedish Catholic Journal, 1922–1945

This article investigates the attitude to communism, National Socialism, Fascism, and authoritarian conservatism in the Swedish Catholic Church’s journal Credo from 1922 to 1945. The comparative approach has made it possible to see how the journal distinguished between the various forms of authoritarian ideologies in Europe during this period. The article shows that the Catholic Church in Sweden took a very negative view of communism (the Soviet Union and the Spanish Republic) and strongly condemned it throughout the period, while it took a largely very positive stance towards Fascism (Italy) and Authoritarian Conservativism (Spain and Portugal). In the case of National Socialism (Nazi Germany) the attitude was more diverse. Credo was largely negative towards National Socialism but only because it was thought to threaten Catholics and Catholicism in Germany. However, Credo never criticized discrimination and genocidal violence against the Jews.

Community characteristics, conservative ideology, and child abuse rates

Authoritarian ideology, including religious conservativism, endorses obedience to authority and physical punishment of children. Although this association has been studied at the level of the family, little research has been conducted on whether conservativism in the broader community context correlates with the mistreatment of children. The purpose of this study was to determine whether this relation between conservativism and physical punishment of children extends to child abuse rates at the community level. Predictors included county-level religious and political conservativism and demographic variables. Political and religious conservativism covaried, and both were inversely related to child abuse rates. Population density was strongly related to rates of maltreatment and with demographic factors controlled, religious conservativism but not political conservativism continued to predict rates of child abuse. The results suggest that community factors related to social disorganization may be more important than religious or political affiliation in putting children at risk for maltreatment.

Reasoning Ability and Ideology

Although much is known about the motivational underpinnings of authoritarian ideologies, less is known about the underlying mental abilities. In the present study, the relations between right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and reasoning abilities were investigated. Participants (n = 198) completed measures of reasoning ability (Necessary Arithmetic Operations task, Diagramming Relationships task), RWA, and SDO. Greater RWA was only associated with lower ability to recognize hierarchical relationships; neither RWA nor SDO were associated with general arithmetic reasoning ability. Implications for understanding ideology are discussed.

European ‘Cultural’ Social Democracy: questions of freedom

<p>Este artículo pretende replantear el tema de la libertad en relación a la democracia social del pasado, del presente y del futuro. Argumento que gran parte del debate contemporáneo sobre la izquierda social demócrata europea pone el énfasis en una agenda comunitaria. A pesar de algunos de sus puntos fuertes este debate es problemático porque deja de lado cuestiones relativas a la libertad y temáticas de orden global. Vuelvo al liberalismo social que emergió en Europa en un contexto de totalitarismo. Los temas de la libertad se pusieron en manifiesto en este contexto, y se pueden volver a retomar de forma productiva en relación con las nuevas dimensiones del presente. Me centro, en particular, en los escritos socialistas «culturales» de 1940 y argumento que pensadores como Fromm, Orwell y Roselli tienen algo que decirnos hoy día. En este punto me pregunto si el neoliberalismo del presente comparte ciertas características con las ideologías autoritarias del pasado. Además intento evaluar críticamente desarrollos más recientes en ideas relacionadas con el potencial emergente de una Europa cosmopolita. Finalmente, en el contexto de crisis social y ecológica de la Europa contemporánea, se aportan sugerencias que puedan contribuir a replantear cuestiones relativas a la libertad y por consiguiente al cambio social.</p><p><strong>Recibido</strong>: 02.11.2012<br /><strong>Aceptado</strong>: 17.12.2012</p>

Purity and Corruption: Chinese Communist Party Applicants and the Problem of Evil

In contemporary China, university students play a key ideological role as the future vanguard of the nation and for this reason they are intensely courted by the Chinese Communist Party. This article addresses the moral ambiguities of this courtship for students, who face the paradox that while the party centre and collectivist authoritarian ideology invariably claims moral superiority, individual party cadres are frequently exposed as morally corrupt. The evil of cadre corruption becomes the nodal point for questioning party morality, a central stake in support of collectivist authoritarian ideology as well as in its denunciation. For students, the problem of evil within the force, representing the collective good is never resolved in either false consciousness or an unmasking of ideology. Doubt instead proceeds as two incommensurable interpretations of party morality persist in suggesting themselves, and this I suggest has important implications for our understanding of political legitimacy in authoritarian states.

Financial Markets and Practices in Emerging Economies

A key question for studying capitalism is its expansion to emerging economies, and increasing efforts have been made to understand the differences between the emerging markets and the developed markets. This symposium focuses on the financial markets and practices in a few developing countries. The research in the symposium highlights two seemingly paradoxical features pertinent to the emerging markets’ institutions: on the one hand, these markets suffer from “institutional voids” (Khanna and Palepu, 1997, p.41; 2009); on the other hand, institutions are usually intense in these markets in terms of heavy government intervention, authoritarian ideology, and special structures and cultural norms. We propose the research agenda that penetrates into the process in which the newly introduced market institutions, the local structures and the actors are interplaying. Smart Money in Dumb Money Presenter: Jiayin Zhang; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Fraud and Innovation: Is There a Cheater's Discount? Presenter: Yanbo Wang; Boston U. Presenter: Jizhen Li; Tsinghua U. To Cash In Or Not: Stock-Option Exercises By Executives of Chinese State-Owned Enterprises Presenter: Fiona Kun Yao; U. of California, Berkeley

Heroism, Raison d'état, and National Communism: Red Nationalism in the Cinema of People's Poland

AbstractUsing archival sources, film reviews, interviews, secondary sources and movies, this article examines a Polish nationalist-communist school of directors who supported the Communist Party regime in constructing a new ethos, which consisted of ethnocentric nationalism and authoritarian nation state ideology. It demonstrates how the party state tried to legitimise itself by endorsing popular culture, specifically mainstream cinema. It also argues that National Communism inevitably led to the nationalist-authoritarian fusion, which set up the conditions for a pluralist and polyphonic realm, outside, but also within the ruling camp.

Comparative Perspectives on Social Integration in Pluralistic Societies: Thick Norms versus Thin

AbstractI address major challenges to dealing with contentious public issues by replacing thick norms with thin ones: (1) Secularism, individual liberty, equal rights, and rule of law lend themselves to politics more thin than thick; does this condemn the approach to its own kind of thickness? (2) If the unit of analysis is the individual, and if the individual’s primary project is his or her liberty, must this approach threaten the communitarian self-understandings of some groups? (3) Does it fundamentalize political liberalism? (4) What about addressees likely to reject thin norms, such as persons guided by an otherworldly authority or an authoritarian ideology? (5) Is this approach defeated where territorialized membership rights clash with thin norms, for example in the European Union: a political and economic community internally somewhat thin yet externally thick?

Dangerous Amnesia

Some of the leading 20th-century philosophical inheritors of Enlightenment thought turned to psychoanalysis as a crucial part of their analysis of the social and individual dynamics of domination and submission. In explaining the ways in which individual pathologies intersect with authoritarian political ideologies and social hatreds, the “Frankfurt School” theorists developed a psychoanalytically informed social theory. They understood that strivings for freedom could not be accomplished only by political revolution. They also had to be accompanied by a transformed internal psychic life that could embrace freedom as essential to psychic and social health. These thinkers held that psychoanalysis was necessary to actualize freedom based on critical subjective agency as concrete realities of daily life. Otherwise, social theory remains detached from individual human experience. This article argues for the relevance and necessity of psychoanalysis for social change. It includes a clinical vignette that illustrates the ways in which individual pathologies intersect with, sustain, and reproduce social intolerance and prejudice.

Allport’s Prejudiced Personality Today

In the long history of psychological research on prejudice, Allport’s (1954) book The Nature of Prejudice is undoubtedly the foundational work, advancing ideas that remain highly influential and relevant to this day. Guided by the seminal ideas of this leading scholar, we illustrate how contemporary psychological research has accumulated evidence for a basic, motivated cognitive style underlying prejudice in its different forms. Specifically, we demonstrate that Allport’s classic conception of this basic cognitive style is exceptionally well captured by the contemporary construct of need for cognitive closure (NFC), and we review the recent evidence for NFC effects on racism and sexism. Integrating Allport’s writings with contemporary research, we also show that the effects of motivated cognition on prejudice are explained (i.e., mediated) by essentialist thinking and authoritarian ideology. Finally, we discuss recent evidence indicating that, in contrast to Allport’s pessimistic predictions, intergroup contact is especially effective in reducing prejudice among people high in NFC. It is concluded that recent research on NFC provides a solid empirical basis for Allport’s hypothesis that a general motivated cognitive style lies at the basis of prejudice.

The English house in the age of its wireless dispersion

In the 1930s, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) broadcast hundreds of wireless programmes on domestic design, good housekeeping and home maintenance. Packaged in twenty-minute transmissions, they were sometimes designed for schoolchildren, at others, for their mothers and yet others for formal listening groups. As quotidian and humble in scale as their topic, broadcast home's ambition was titanic: to reform this oldest building typology into a training ground for the exercise of individual common sense, a modern cradle of and for a nation of competing, self-interested but inter-subjectively connected individuals, that would immunise British liberal democracy against the seductions of spectacle and grandiose monumentality of authoritarian ideologies. If the logic of typography had induced the professional journal to preserve the notion of house, even one that was mass-produced, as a monument, wireless, which Marshall McLuhan insightfully calls the reverberating ‘tribal drum’, supported an inclusive, pluralistic and implosive ideal. The hypnotic spell of the wirelessly disseminated voice identified the contemporary ‘house’, even one that was tailor made, with large-scale production: a mass-produced, mass-consumed, all-encompassing, everyday and authorless commodity. This projected a middle-of-the-road, consumer-oriented-modernism envisioned by G.M. Boumphrey, Wells Coates, Frank Pick, Anthony Bertram, and John Gloag, encompassing new rituals of national initiation not by over-coding but enhancing the private scenes of Oedipal formation at work in identification with home and family.

Some Implications of Apartheid Legacies in South African Correctional Centres

I conducted critical research into the apparently unrelenting culture of violation in South Africa generally, and specifically in correctional centres. In defining violation, I slightly modify Fanon's definition of violence to encompass “any relation, process or condition by which an individual, organisation or group violates the physical, social and/or psychological integrity of [the self and] another person or group”. I show that the authoritarian ideology underlying apartheid left structural legacies that undermine rehabilitation and transformation to a culture of mutual respect at interpersonal and institutional levels. I do so by contrasting some extant authoritarian indicators: top-down discipline and militarism, with indicators of mutual recognition and respect to show that both safety and rehabilitation are compromised by unnecessary perpetuation of authoritarian ideology in correctional centres. Critically questioning the traditional top-down structure and substituting mutuality as crucial to rehabilitation necessarily called for the application of theoretical assumptions consistent with intersubjectivity. I use a person-in-practice method whereby I juxtapose my own voice with those of clients, academics, society (as represented in the news media) and staff in the correctional system. This method streamlines as a coherent process, and an effective means to demonstrate my thesis.

Some ideas on interrupting the right

In a considerable number of nations, `conservative modernization' has gained increasing influence. Neo-liberals, neo-conservatives, and new middle-class mangerialists have defined the terrain of educational policy and practice. In some nations as well, authoritarian populist religious conservative movements and ideologies have also become major actors in the struggles over what the ends and means of education are. I critically examine the contradictory alliance that has been built among these movements and ideologies. However, understanding the reasons behind the growing influence of these positions is not sufficient. I then discuss a number of strategies for interrupting their power, some of which may be risky but are worth being taken seriously if we are to engage in successful counter-hegemonic activity.

Right‐Wing Authoritarianism, Attitude Salience, and Beliefs about Matters of Fact

Previous investigations have demonstrated a relationship between endorsement of right‐wing authoritarian (RWA) ideology and attitudes toward social and societal issues (e.g., abortion, drug use, affirmative action, and homosexuality). By contrast, the present studies examined the relationship between RWA and beliefs about matters of fact bearing on such issues (e.g., estimates of the prevalence of third trimester abortions, AIDS, concealed weapons). Studies 1 and 2 supported the propositions that high‐RWA and low‐RWA participants would show differences in their informational beliefs about sociopolitical matters consistent with differences in their respective ideologies and consistent with their putative differential cynicism about human nature. Study 3 demonstrated that the relationship between RWA and informational beliefs is amplified by the heightened salience of attitudes toward the targets of those beliefs.

Des acteurs étatiques : Léviathan en Amérique

This paper deals with the internal dynamics of the Latin American States. Having identified the demographic changes - urbanization, rejuvenating process, widespread education — the author introduces the social changes which have caused the spreading to the masses, to social segmentation and individualization. This is followed by a study of the ideologies which relate the social orientations of the individuals or segmented groups with the overall representations which value authoritarianism, populism, nationalism and state socialism. The analysis of authoritarian ideologies, of social individualism, and of the fragmentized political rivalries validates the internal hypothesis according to which the state actors of Latin America operate with considerable autonomy on the international scène as compared to the other actors.

Latin America's Lost Illusions: Dispirited Politics

Abstract: A rash of commentaries have suggested that elections last year in Brazil and Ecuador tilted Latin America far leftward. The new presidents Lula and Lino Gutierrez are portrayed as the political heirs of Castro and Chavez. This is nonsense. Latin America is not jettisoning democratic politics or shifting toward the populist left. Still, the quality of democratic politics is mediocre across the region and, in many places, is deteriorating. Some countries, prominently Argentina and Venezuela, are in crisis. Yet, politics in region's two largest countries-Brazil and Mexico-is increasingly robust, and they may soon join Latin America's perennially vibrant trio of Costa Rica, Chile and Uruguay. What endangers Latin American democracy today is not demagogic politicians, ambitious military officers, or authoritarian ideologies. It is lackluster performance-the failure of governments to meet their citizens' needs.

Strategies of justification in authoritarian ideology

How many possible ways are there to justify authoritarian rule? If we leave aside the consequentialist arguments and focus only on the principled justifications for political inequality, the conventional answer in the literature is one: authoritarian rule always takes the form of guardianship, which is premised on the principle of unequal competence. In this paper, however, I show that five distinct justifications for authoritarian government are possible if we begin by equating democracy with political equality. Having mapped out these logical possibilities, I then illustrate each strategy with examples drawn from the ideologies of a wide range of modern authoritarian regimes. Using the typology I also chart trends within the universe of authoritarian ideology during the past century. One of the trends I uncover is the relative decline of guardianship as an authoritarian ideology in favour of other strategies of justification.

Un científico en la política peruana. Mariano H. Cornejo, la república aristocrática y la patria nueva, 1895-1920

Through the study of the political life of sociologist Mariano H. Cornejo I try to revalue the strategic role that this important person occupied in the trajectory of the Peruvian party systems between 1895 and 1919. Also this study analyses his participation in the making of the authoritarian ideology of Augusto B. Leguia’s Patria Nueva since 1920. This sociologist subordinated all his political interpretations to his positivist ideology.

Barriers to Effective Drug Abuse Prevention: The Role of Authoritarian Ideology

The relationships between authoritarian ideology and attitudes and beliefs about illegal drugs, the War on Drugs, and prevention strategies were investigated among 353 university faculty, administrators, and students. A confidential mail survey assessed five variables: right-wing authoritarianism, attitude toward drug legalization, attitude toward drug decriminalization, belief regarding the controlled use of illegal drugs, and the tendency to endorse a “just say no” approach to substance abuse prevention. Multivariate analyses revealed that highly authoritarian participants were significantly more opposed to both drug legalization and drug decriminalization than less authoritarian participants. Only nonauthoritarian participants favored decriminalization, though they did not favor legalization. Compared to those scoring lower on authoritarianism, higher-scoring authoritarian participants held significantly more dichotomous beliefs about illegal drugs (i.e., that abstinence or compulsive drug abuse are the only possibilities related to involvement with illegal drugs). They were also less likely to recommend to potential drug users that they consider following guidelines for their use that may potentially function as protective factors against drug abuse, preferring instead to endorse the slogan “just say no to drugs.” Comparisons between groups revealed that students scored significantly higher on authoritari anism and demonstrated significantly greater opposition to drug decriminalization than did faculty and administrators.

The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America.

This work presents a revisionist account of Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential thought on individualism, in particular his political psychology. The author analyzes the interplay of liberal and authoritarian impulses in Emerson's work in various domains: domestic life, the changing New England economy, theories of poetic language, homoerotic friendship, and racial hierarchy. Focusing on neglected later writings, Newfield shows how Emerson explored the tensions between autonomy and community - and consistently resolved these tensions by abandoning crucial elements of both and redefining autonomy as a kind of liberating subjection. He argues that in Emersonian individualism, self-determination is accompanied by submission to authority, and examines the influence of this submissive individualism on the history of American liberalism. In a reading of Emerson's early and neglected later works, the study analyzes Emerson's emphasis on collective, or corporate, world-building, rather than private possession. Tracing the development of this corporate individualism, he illuminates contradictions in Emerson's political outlook, and the conjunctions of liberal and authoritarian ideology they produced.