Some Americans prefer obedient, respectful, and well-mannered children and others prefer independent, curious, and self-reliant kids. And that divide is a surprisingly broad window into contemporary political views and partisan choices. How did we become increasingly divided by our preferences for order over independence? Christopher Federico and Christopher Weber find that authoritarian values, measured by these parenting preferences, increasingly structure Americans’ attitudes toward social and cultural issues and their political predispositions. Now that the parties divide on cultural concerns, especially in the Trump era, these attitudes increasingly drive White Americans’ partisanship and vote choices.
Guests: Christopher Federico, the University of Minnesota; Christopher Weber, University of Arizona
Study: The Authoritarian Divide
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: How authoritarian parenting attitudes explain our political divides this week on the Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossman. Some Americans prefer obedient, respectful, and well-mannered children, and others prefer independent, curious, and self-reliant kids. And that divide is a surprisingly broad window into contemporary political views and partisan choices. How did we become increasingly divided by our preferences for order or independence? This week, I talked to Christopher Federico of the University of Minnesota and Christopher Weber of the University of Arizona about their new Oxford book with Stanley Feldman, The Authoritarian Divide. They find that authoritarian values measured by these parenting preferences increasingly structures Americans’ attitudes towards social and cultural issues and their political predispositions. Now that the parties divide on cultural concerns, especially in the Trump era, these attitudes increasingly drive especially white Americans’ partisanship and vote choices. I think you’ll find our discussion illuminating.
So Dr. Federico, tell us about the main findings and takeaways from the new book, The Authoritarian Divide.
Christopher Federico: Well, thank you, Matt. So in our book, we identify the factors that have shaped and conditioned the sorting of Americans into different belief patterns and partisan camps as a function of authoritarianism over the last 30 years. And we do this using nationally representative survey samples, panel data and experiments. And what the conclusion we come away from with, excuse me, is that authoritarianism is increasingly structured a wide range of attitudes. It’s become a growing influence on vote choice. And we show basically on the whole that the parties have indeed sorted in the average levels of authoritarianism of their members. Now, we are not the first people to look at this question of how the parties or partisans are diverging in authoritarianism, but what we do here is we make the case that the impact of authoritarianism on the evolution of partisanship and mass opinion has been more complex and contingent than previous treatments have suggested.
So among other things, what we show is that it appears to be limited primarily to white Americans. Even if you look only at white Americans in addition, you find that it hasn’t really unfolded among them in a simple, linear, steady state fashion. So authoritarian sorting among white Americans really seems to intensify only when the parties offer political choices, candidate choices that are differentially appealing to those low and high authoritarianism. And the argument we make here is that what causes that differential appeal is when the parties adopt sharply polarized styles and issue positions specifically on sociocultural issues surrounding morality, race and ethnicity, and so on and so forth. When the parties don’t offer candidates that diverge as much, you don’t see that increase. So it’s happened kind of in a stop and start fashion. The other thing we show along these lines is that authoritarian sorting has proceeded somewhat differently for white Americans with different levels of education.
And part of the argument we’re making here is that people who are more educated, among other things, they’re more attentive to politics. They hear what political leaders say and they get a better feel for how the parties differ in the choices they are offering. So what we find here is that educated white Americans are always more sorted into different parties on the basis of authoritarianism, but the largest increase in authoritarian sorting has really occurred among the less educated. And we find that that is because, or we argue that that is because the signals that are put out there about the differences between the parties, the cultural differences between the parties have become so much stronger that even those who are less attentive are picking up on them. So we also show that authoritarianism increasingly constrains Americans’ belief systems. So it’s not just partisanship and voting, but it’s their belief systems.
It’s also become increasingly linked to people’s perceptions of ideological polarization between the parties and the extent to which they rely on judgments of ideological closeness between themselves and the parties when they vote.
Matt Grossmann: So Dr. Weber, we have sort of three generations of scholars, if not demographics we’ve brought together in this book, and we have a long intellectual history of how authoritarianism has been conceptualized and used. So tell us the backstory of how we got to this book.
Christopher Weber: I’ve collaborated with both Chris and Stanley for, well, my entire career on a number of things, but authoritarianism in particular. I’ve worked with Chris since college and I’ve worked with Stanley as my dissertation advisor since grad school. So there’s a lot of work we’ve done, some published, some otherwise. This project, however, was born out of a meeting at Potter’s Bar in Chicago in the Palmer House at the Midwest Political Science Association in 2017. We had a much larger or longer discussion at the 2017 meeting in Edinburgh. If you rewind back in time to 2017, 2016, 2017, political scientists and academics in general were really striving to understand the factors that predicted Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, from ideology, policy to a number of studies on personality characteristics. So in these meetings, we reasoned through the various ways that authoritarianism may have influenced this election, discussed competing alternative explanations.
And with the release of the 2016 NES, which had this robust set of questions about voting, including authoritarianism, we ended up ultimately publishing a short monkey cage piece from this project, and it then turned or evolved into a larger book manuscript, the project that we have now.
Matt Grossmann: So Dr. Federico, the uninitiated might think we’re talking about views of authoritarian political systems versus democratic political systems, and may be surprised to learn that we are talking about measurement via parenting attitudes. So tell us about this measure, why people who prefer obedient children are considered authoritarian, what it means to be on the other end of that scale, and just why we would expect this attitude to be related to political views and to be the source of many.
Christopher Federico: Well, thanks, Matt. Those are all important questions. To give you a bottom line upfront on this, in part, our choice of terminology reflects path dependence. The term authoritarianism has been used for some time in the social and behavioral sciences to describe a individual level psychological predisposition toward conformity and obedience in group context versus a preference for more individual autonomy. So like others or other recent researchers in political science, we define the authoritarian predisposition fairly specifically as a preference for seeing conformity enforced in the context of group life versus, again, allowing greater individual autonomy. Now, in the book itself, we do spend some time reviewing the long history of the construct, and we describe the origins of the idea of authoritarianism in the encounter between social theory and personality psychology in the first part of the 20th century. And we look at its rise, fall, and reemergence as an explanation for prejudice and ideological attitudes and later psychological research.
So one thing we try to emphasize is that the original terminology of authoritarianism, the original conceptual apparatus that was used to sort of expound on it comes out of psychology. So it was psychologists not necessarily trying to explain a specific form of government. So we follow in that tradition. And while we review a lot of other conceptualizations of authoritarianism, we ultimately rely on the one that has become essential to political science research, which again, focuses very specifically on a motive to seek collective security and order and obedience and conformity in group contexts. One reason we rely on this fairly simple definition, which as you noted at a measurement level relies on people’s child wearing values, is it helps separate the predisposition to authoritarianism, to wanting to see clear lines of authority and conformity and normative order within groups. It helps separate that from specific political positions that are often the consequence of that predisposition to authoritarianism.
So one nice thing about the measure we use is that it doesn’t include a lot of additional content that gets at specific socially conservative positions. Now, you can’t completely get the politics and the ideology out of it, but asking when raising children, do you favor independence or respect for elders, obedience or self-reliance, curiosity or good manners, it’s less politically freighted than if you start directly asking about religion, traditional values, rights for LGBTQ folk and so on and so forth. So that’s a major reason for us. Another reason is simply that this is an easy measure to use. It doesn’t have a lot of items. It has reasonably good psychometric properties, and it’s been consistently included in over 30 years of American national election study data, and that overtime time series element to what we do, that’s a very important part of the story we want to tell.
Now to step back from that, one thing we do acknowledge wholeheartedly is that use of the term authoritarianism to describe this dimension has been criticized. So in particular, our colleagues, Mark Heatherington and Jonathan Weiler have recently suggest, for example, that it might be better to use the terms fixed versus fluid to describe the two poles of this dimension. We ultimately don’t follow in that. We do think that the child rearing items do get at a basic cross-culturally sound way of getting at how people feel normatively about how authority should work. So we do use that. It’s worth reviewing a couple of the specific objections that people have made just to get them out there and how we respond to them. First of all, one very reasonable objection to our use of the term authoritarianism and how we use it is the one that you mentioned.
It’s also used particularly in political science to describe non-democratic oppressive political systems. We don’t use the term authoritarianism in a sense, and we take pains to distinguish our use from that use. An important thing that we, or important point we make is that neither our conceptual nor our operational definition of authoritarianism include an explicit ironclad connection with support for authoritarian government. That said in the later chapter… In the last empirical chapter of the book, we do explore the relationship between authoritarianism and support for a liberal anti-democratic forms of government. Another important specific criticism that’s made of the use of the term authoritarianism is that the term also characterizes or carries with it negative associations that might cast people who score high on the dimension in a negative light. So are these people who are just mindlessly obedient, mindlessly conformist, and so on and so forth.
So authoritarianism undoubtedly correlates across a variety of research with some negative outcomes, but we do want to emphasize that conformity and obedience themselves as aspects of social life are not invariable evil. In fact, they’re essential at some level and to some extent to human social cohesion in groups. They would have been especially important to human survival in the environment that our ancestors evolved in. All complex societies and their inhabitants have to confront trade offs between authority and conformity on one hand and personal autonomy on the other. In many life situations, however, submitting to authority is the adaptive response to threat. So we do qualify at various points our use of the term and note that we’re not trying to argue that any kind of conformity or obedience is necessarily to be deplored. So all of that said, we continue to use the term not to denigrate any set of individuals or claim that all individuals who score high on authoritarianism will reject democracy, but really to maintain continuity with a rich history of research across academic disciplines on authoritarianism.
We believe that the findings from decades of research on authoritarianism are important enough to make sure our connection to that body of literature is evident even at the risk of confusion on another.
Matt Grossmann: Dr. Weber, today, the people who score high on this authoritarianism scale are more likely to be Republicans and conservatives and hold conservative views, particularly on social and cultural issues, but of course we’re dealing with observational research for the most part and correlations among survey question answers. I know you all do quite a bit in terms of trying to use panel studies and some experiments and other tests to get at this, but how sure are we that these parenting values are the prior causes of these other political predispositions?
Christopher Weber: That’s a great question, Matt. A couple of reactions. Just to pick up on what Chris was saying, authoritarianism continues to be and has been measured in a variety of ways in the literature. One of the common approaches in psychology, probably the most common approach is to use a scale called right-wing authoritarianism. This is developed by the psychologist, Bob Altemeier. Many publications are out there on this. One of our concerns is that a scale like RWA conflates personality and politics. It mixes together personality characteristics, this tendency to submit to authority with questions about politics. If you remember back to what authoritarianism is, it’s submission to authority, aggression against out groups who violate conventional norms and a set of conventional values. And so we believe it’s important to consider this, a number of items in the RWA scale reference social attitudes and politics. And so it becomes really difficult to tease apart what comes first if your personality construct includes political items or political content that’s then predicting political content.
So we sidestepped this problem again by using the child-rearing items. There are four of these asks questions about independence or respect for elders, the importance of obedience or self-reliance. So I’ll answer your question both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, it seems doubtful that something like partisanship would shape something that’s so inherently apolitical. It seems in many ways doubtful that this is the case. It’s more likely. This would be a much more serious critique, we think, if we were using some of these other scales like RWA. Empirically, this is really difficult to tease apart in practice because both authoritarianism and partisanship, for instance, are remarkably stable constructs. They don’t change over time. So it becomes really difficult to tease apart which one comes first. So we sort of rely on the conceptual aspect of this that we’re really using an apolitical scale.
And in terms of this kind of stability, for instance, we tend to find, so if you think back to Phil Converse’s classic study on partisanship, you tend to find partisanship is stable from wave to wave at .72, .73. It’s in that range. The correlation in research between RWA tends to be something like .74, .75. So you have these remarkably stable things. We estimate a correlation or over time correlation correcting for measurement error of authoritarianism of about .86, .87. So we have something that’s really not shifting or changing from year to year if we’re sort of looking at panel data. It’s also important to note that there’s a literature showing that authoritarianism is partially heritable. There’s a heritable component to the construct, which again, theoretically what we believe is some evidence to suggest that it probably is causally prior to rather than a consequence of partisanship. We do deal with this issue more forcefully in the manuscript in a variety of ways, one of which is to use experiments.
We can’t randomly assign people to be an authoritarian or not, or to be a Democrat or Republican. That won’t work against stable constructs that don’t move. But one of our arguments in the book is that authoritarianism varies in its consequence depending on the overarching political and social conditions that we’re looking at. So in some elections, given the rhetoric and the state of society, we see an elevated effect of authoritarianism. In other elections, we see a much more reduced or muted effect. We believe that part of this is, again, tied to politics of the time and the candidates and the rhetoric of the time and the notion of normative threat. How threatening is say the opposing party to one’s own party? What issues are pervasive in that election? Do they draw on divisive social and cultural issues? And in these kind of elections, we tend to observe authoritarianism has a stronger effect.
So we address this directly in some of these experiments by varying in a typical experiment where we vary positions taken by political candidates. We vary whether the Democratic candidate takes, say, liberal or conservative positions on economic or social issues like LGBTQ rights or immigration. And what we tend to find throughout this exercise is that when candidates are perceived as normatively threatening, say a socially liberal Democrat, this activates authoritarianism and tends to lead to a much more heightened impact of authoritarianism on support for a Republican over a Democratic candidate. So again, while we’re not manipulating authoritarianism directly, we’re manipulating this kind of cultural or normative threat, and we find that this very much changes the expression of authoritarianism.
Matt Grossmann: Dr. Federico, you mentioned that this process has been playing out mostly among white Americans, but we’re talking about it as a stable psychological predisposition that is responding to the political choices on offer. So why is it that we would expect this to mainly be playing out among white Americans? Why don’t other racial groups respond similarly to the choices that they’re given based on their underlying predispositions?
Christopher Federico: Well, there are a couple of things that we believe are happening here. One of those two things, the easiest way of summing it up is that authoritarianism or the authoritarian predisposition predicts a wider range of socially conservative attitudes across a wider set of issues for white Americans than it does for non-white groups. In our data, we look particularly at Black Americans and Hispanic Americans, in part because that’s where the greatest data availability is. So to unpack that a bit, we find that authoritarianism predicts social conservatism regarding gender, morality, religion, and questions of basic public order in the abstract similarly across white Americans, Black Americans, and Hispanic Americans. So that’s sort of a socially conservative, quote, unquote, “authoritarian belief system” that you find among just about everyone. So there’s that universal aspect of what authoritarianism predicts.
However, we find that there is a subset of additional socially conservative positions that authoritarianism predicts mainly or only in some cases among white Americans. So the white majority in this country is somewhat unique in that authoritarians within this majority are also motivated to seek to protect the dominant status of the white in group against the, quote, unquote, “danger” posed by inroads made by minorities. So authoritarianism as a result predicts racial conservatism and immigration restriction among whites, but not so much among Black Americans and Hispanic Americans. So one way to think of why we see this is that Americans’ long history of durable racial subordination has important effects on the extent to which racial conservatism, xenophobia, immigration restrictionism and what have you serves the interest in collective security and order that we typically associate with high authoritarianism.
So racial inequality, white supremacy, they satisfy a psychological need for order among members of the dominant group that are high in authoritarianism, but not so much among members of historically subordinated groups. So for Black Americans and white Americans, even if they’re fairly authoritarian, racial inequality really just leads to a more chaotic, unpredictable, and insecure group life. So authoritarianism doesn’t have that same effect on how appealing racial inequality is to members of racial minority groups. Now, the other part of this that’s worth noting, the second part is that in the United States politics, in group norms for what partisan identity is appropriate differ enormously across groups. So for example, and perhaps most clearly Democratic partisanship is strongly normative for Black Americans, even among conservative Black Americans who might for ideological reasons be inclined or more likely to vote Republican.
This is also true among Hispanics, though it is less of a pronounced norm for Hispanics than it is for Black Americans. So that’s another thing. To the extent that authoritarianism encourages you or motivates you to adhere to group norms, white Americans, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans have somewhat different group norms regarding partisanship. And those group norms push against identifying as a Republican, particularly if you’re Black, but also to some extent if you’re Hispanic. So to get back to the main point here, this means a set of socio-culturally conservative beliefs associated with authoritarianism really is larger in scope for white Americans. And this leads white authoritarians to sort into the Republican Party to a far greater extent than non-white authoritarians have.
Matt Grossmann: Dr. Weber, you mentioned that you have some candidate choice experiments that show that these divisions are largely responsive to candidates’ social and cultural issue positions like immigration and LGBT issues. And you show over time and within surveys that it’s not tax views and health policy views that are predicted by this, but are these kind of social and cultural positions. So it is the macro story here really about changes in the political system that we’re increasingly talking about social and cultural issues and that some predispositions that went together with them are now looking more important, but it’s because of these changes in what the left and right mean.
Christopher Weber: This is really a key argument in our book that this sort of sociocultural branding of the parties, particularly under Trump, has in many ways focused or enhanced the consequences of authoritarianism. It again, tends to be the case that authoritarianism and its effects exist in a start, stop or non-monotonic fashion over elections where we find that authoritarianism has a really heightened effect during the Trump era, as well as the 2004 election. We definitely think that authoritarianism is very much part of this broader story about polarization and in supplements in many ways, some of the important work or much of the important work being done in this particular area. There’s undoubtedly been sorting, for instance, on dimensions like race and ethnicity and ideology, there’s evidence of geographic sorting.
Our work in many ways is a further data point here focusing on an individual level characteristic and how, again, the broader political context in a given election year, for instance, enhances or maybe sort of mutes the effect of authoritarianism. And this could go in any direction. So say Mitt Romney decided to have another go at it and was nominated to run under the GOP or the GOP ticket. In that circumstance, we would anticipate that these kind of social and cultural issues would be less ascendant, maybe less divisive, less relevant, and authoritarianism would have a more reduced or muted impact. So the basic argument in the book is again, that authoritarianism led sorting has in many ways restructured partisan politics and perhaps even provided incentives now for politicians to use divisive social and cultural issues or highlight these notions of normative threat to rally these sorts of voters.
But again, it’s important to note that in our book, we don’t find this kind of constant sorting that’s occurring. There’s authoritarian-led sorting, but it’s kind of this non-monotonic, some elections, it’s a large effect like 2004, 2016, others like 2008 or 2012, authoritarianism doesn’t really predict political outcomes to the degree that say it does now. So in many ways, picking up on a broader story, I’m not sure if I’m totally answering the question, that is contributors to polarization and sorting, but also that this can go in different directions. The strategic decision of a party to pursue these divisive politics resonates with authoritarians. It may not move people to become more authoritarian or even less authoritarian. Rather, the argument is that these issues change the expression of authoritarianism. They enhance the expression or mute the expression of authoritarianism. So these kind of strategic decisions made by the parties and the candidates we think is one reason why we observe this varying effect over time.
Matt Grossmann: Dr. Federico, you mentioned that you do have a last empirical chapter where you tried to address the relationship between this and the association of anti-democratic attitudes with Trump supporters or the acceptance of democratic backsliding, and Dr. Weber mentioned that the project was conceived in the wake of the 2016 election. So what is the bottom line now on the extent to which this story helps to explain either Trump’s rise or the continuing acceptability of what he’s doing to a large part of the electorate?
Christopher Federico: So this is basically how we close out the empirical portion of our book, and in doing so, we’re trying to loop back to a question that has really motivated researchers interested in authoritarianism as a psychological construct since the dawn of theory on that. Again, the original motivation for studying this came out of the period of European history where fascism had arisen. German social theorists, particularly the Frankfurt School of critical theory, are very much interested in why, given that their relatively advanced societies were entering crisis, why there was a tendency for some significant portions of the mass publics in those societies to side with fascist or nationalistic ideologies rather than trying to move society to something that was more egalitarian or that moved us past the kind of capitalism that existed then. So since the dawn of work on this, there’s been a strong interest in explaining why it is that or whether it is that people who are high in authoritarianism tend to be more disinclined to democracy.
So we do a couple of things in the book to try to address this question. So first of all, we look at several recent… Well, not several, but a couple of recent observational data sets. We looked at more than actually ended up in the book and they all pretty much told the same story. What we show using observational data is that authoritarianism predicts anti-democratic attitudes, a variety of anti-democratic attitudes among white Americans, regardless of partisanship. Now, one thing we find with respect to partisanship in particular is that all other things being equal, white Republicans do tend to show more anti-democratic attitudes. That said, the effect of authoritarianism seems to be there among Democrats, Republicans and independents within the white majority in general. So all other things being equal, if you are high in authoritarianism, you are also more likely to endorse various anti-democratic attitudes, whether you’re a white Democrat, a white independent, or a white Republican. So there’s a pretty consistent relationship there that transcends partisanship in a sense, even if at a baseline level, anti-democratic attitudes are most pronounced among Republicans.
Now, that gives you an idea of generally how authoritarianism relates to anti-democratic attitudes, but another major concern is does authoritarianism, in particular in the white majority in the United States, does that predispose people to respond more positively to anti-democratic appeals such as the ones that Donald Trump has made in his 10 or so years at the top of American politics? Now, the thing is if we want to isolate the effects of anti-democratic appeals, there are a lot of things that might activate authoritarianism. So a simple anti-[inaudible 00:36:25] rhetoric may do it as well. So we have to try to find a way of unpacking specifically when anti-democratic appeals activate authoritarianism.
So we conducted a survey experiment that essentially manipulated a conservative political candidate’s commitment to democracy. So despite the greater polarization of white partisans on both authoritarianism and commitment to democracy, we found that conservative candidates who made explicitly anti-democratic appeals really weren’t any more attractive to white authoritarians or white non-authoritarians. So adding an anti-democratic appeal did not really boost the appeal of conservative candidates among authoritarians, even when those conservative candidates also tempted those same white authoritarians with a promise to, say, reduced immigration. So at least among white Americans, individuals who are chronically more authoritarian tend to hold more anti-democratic attitudes. However, and somewhat more reassuringly, right-leaning candidates who make explicitly anti-democratic appeals don’t seem to receive a bonus level of support over and above the baseline level of support that, at this point, right-leaning candidates get among white authoritarians.
Matt Grossmann: Dr. Federico, one of the main parts of that comparative argument is that we’re seeing real change in social and cultural values in society as a whole in a leftward direction over time, and toward more highly salient, these issues, as economic concerns become less so. So it’s hard to even think about, say, what your experiments would even mean to someone talking about transgender issues in 1980s or 1990s, so obviously, it’s a moving window what this dimension taps. So are we now at a point in which these authoritarian views are just what social conservatism is and that it just manifests in different ways based on the actual direction of society?
Christopher Federico: Well, I think the best response to give to that is that authoritarianism as we conceptually and operationally define it is something different from and less politically concrete than social conservatism. That said, for a variety of social factors or for a variety of social reasons, authoritarianism as we do define it, this general predisposition to seek conformity and order and obedience within groups, that it is very highly associated with social conservatism.
One way to think about this is really, how has the human cognitive architecture evolved over evolutionary time? As I noted earlier, as unappealing as the idea of conformity or obedience might seem from an aesthetic standpoint in the context of our society, and given that many negative things are associated with that, clearly group cohesion would have served an adaptive purpose in the ancestral human environment. So there’s a reason to believe that human beings have kind of a general module for that fundamental aspect of social life in groups. There is a predisposition, which varies from one individual to the next, to obey.
But what does a tendency toward conformity or to seek conformity correlate with in a given social and historical content? And while there’s some relative constants like disliking or wanting to punish people who are deviant in some respect, what is considered deviant and what is most saliently considered deviant is going to differ from one context to the next. Now, what we see in our society is that opinion leaders associated with the two parties have increasingly diverged over the last 30 years in terms of the extent to which they send distinct signals about the cultural branding of the parties across a variety of issues. With those stronger signals, in general, we find that people who are high in authoritarianism sort into socially conservative beliefs and those low in authoritarianism sort into socially liberal beliefs.
So we find that authoritarianism for example, at least among white Americans, does predict this wide range of socially conservative beliefs, from LGBTQ rights to immigration to moral traditionalism and so on. But the tightness of that belief system and the relationship between its elements and authoritarianism has grown over time. It is much stronger now than it was in 1992, and the biggest increase has actually occurred among people who are least attentive, so those who are lower in education. The signals become so strong that it’s broken through even to people who habitually pay less attention to politics.
So authoritarianism as a basic psychological predisposition that is relatively universal across human groups, that differs from the broader ideological apparatus of social conservatism, yet at this point, for a variety of reasons that have to do with the party system, with elite cues and so on and so forth, we find that authoritarianism in this general psychological sense as we define it is very much heavily bound up at this point with social conservatism.
Now again, an important qualification to this is that the scope and extent of that socially conservative belief system that goes along with authoritarianism is different for white Americans and for those in groups that have historically been minoritized in the United States. For those groups, for Hispanics and Black Americans for example, it does not include the way it does for white folks to the same extent that predisposition to racial conservatism, to xenophobia, to desiring immigration to be restricted.
Matt Grossmann: Dr. Weber, I know it is dangerous to predict the future, but it certainly seems that if what’s necessary to keep this going is that the parties are going to continue to articulate clear views on these issues and prioritize them, then we’re stuck in this pattern or that it might continue to increase. We also have seen some moves among Hispanic and Asian Americans toward Republican candidates in the last two election cycles, and some might relate that to the enlarging of some of these divides among white Americans to other social groups, if not Black Americans. So can we confidently suggest that if the parties keep presenting these options, we’ll continue seeing these patterns among voters and that it might be expanding from white voters?
Christopher Weber: Yeah, that’s a great question. This project, like I think most political science or social science projects, this is a moving target, this is constantly changing. So we embarked on this project shortly after the 2016 election, got our act together, wrote a lot of good stuff, and then 2020 happened, and then the midterms happened, and we’ve seen real change in rhetoric from the parties, issues that are discussed, positions adopted by the parties over a pretty short period. And so if you return back to this idea that authoritarianism has had this kind of non-constant impact on things like voting and policy attitudes, we should probably also think about what this means for the coalitions, the political coalitions that constitute the two parties.
It might seem like from our discussion that we now have two really homogenous political parties. We’ve got the Republican Party is the authoritarian party and the Democratic Party is the non-authoritarian party. That oversimplifies things a great deal, and in fact, in our book, the story is much more nuanced than this. So on the left, if we look at the Democratic Party, what we undoubtedly see is that over time, authoritarians have left, the Democratic Party have defected and joined or identified as Republican. So you might think, well, that means that there’s more authoritarians in the Republican Party, it’s more homogenous, it’s like a unified authoritarian party. That’s not really true.
So what also happened in this same period, you might expect, and if you expect this, unfortunately you would be incorrect, that non-authoritarians flee the Republican Party for the Democratic Party. We don’t actually find as strong of evidence to suggest this. There is movement, but the movement tends to be towards the independent rather than the Democratic category, and it’s much more recent.
And if we think about this from ideology and the two dimensions of ideology having an economic or a social dimension, there are divisions in both parties around this notion of authoritarianism. So we certainly see that the GOP has appealed to authoritarians, developed a MAGA brand that’s very much authoritarian, an almost reflexive tendency to support Trump on a variety of cultural issues, many of which are quite divisive. At the same time, you’ve got a faction of the party, of the GOP that is non-authoritarian, limited government, individualism, freedom, broad support for non-governmental solutions to problems. You have, again, a group of, say, non-authoritarians who remain in the Republican Party, and this speaks to, I think, a really fundamental division on the right.
It’s similar and different in the Democratic Party. And what I mean here is that you also have more varied attitudes or more varied degrees of authoritarianism. You certainly have non-authoritarian whites who constitute the party; but also this is a coalition of minority groups as well, many of whom may sort of lean more authoritarian than non-authoritarians. Sort of divisions between racial and ethnic groups on this front on the political left.
And so I think this is important because much of this is sort of in flux. Will individuals who are authoritarian and are part of a minority group leave the Democratic Party for the Republican Party? We certainly saw some evidence maybe of this in ’24 where Latinos, Blacks, Arab-Americans, for instance, moving in the Republican direction more so than in previous elections. But at the same time, you sort of have recent polling data that suggests that much of these trends may have actually reverted back.
So think about divisions within the party, the divisions that might exist on racial or even ethnic grounds as very much being bound up in this construct, this sort of fundamental division between submitting to authority and sort of reflexively following authority versus bucking that trend and being more non-authoritarian in one’s outlook.
Matt Grossmann: Dr. Federico, from another perspective that sees this as more US specific, folks might say that this story is actually understating the role of race in all of this, that the fact that it’s occurring mainly among white Americans is a sign that it’s mainly about racial resentment, about the specific racial group hierarchy within the United States and that what you’re characterizing as psychological predispositions really is just the intersection of that with who is on top in the racial hierarchy. And so we might only expect this pattern to occur for whites and only in a country with this kind of racial history. What do you think?
Christopher Federico: Well, it’s an interesting question. One basic part of this is just this question of, well, to what extent does authoritarianism relate to group-based forms of hostility? And I think the question we would give, or the response that comes out of what we do, is that it really kind of depends on the type of group attitude and what group an individual citizen belongs to.
So one thing you find, not just in the United States, but in a variety of places, is that authoritarianism is associated with higher levels of what you might call generalized prejudice, dislike of groups that are seen as marginal, deviant or in any way different from the norm. Part of this is, well, how is a particular society structured? Is there a set of social and historical conditions that puts one group, say, white Americans in the United States, on top? And what we generally find is that authoritarianism is a general predisposition to support social conformity and order and certain types of hierarchy that results in more prejudiced opinions or greater support for white supremacy, whatever you want to call it, among members of the dominant group, but not so much among members of groups that are not dominant.
Obviously, things like anti-immigrant sentiment and racial resentment for the white majority in the United States are a major way that authoritarianism expresses itself. And part of that is because racial hierarchy is a traditional part of what America has looked like. And if you’re predisposed to support traditional or stable arrangements and see any deviation from those things as threatening social cohesion, you are going to see a stronger relationship between authoritarianism and say support for racial hierarchy, support for immigration restriction and things like that. But again, it’s somewhat limited to members of fairly dominant groups.
Now, thinking about it in comparative terms, I think leads you to qualify any assertion that this is solely a function of racial resentment. Clearly, racial resentment, anti-immigrant sentiment are a clear way in which authoritarianism or the authoritarian predisposition express themselves among white Americans in the United States. And that’s a key way in which it manifests itself in this country. Said, as we kind of touched on earlier, a variety of societies, even societies that do not have our long history of racial hierarchy, racial stratification and what have you, there is a sorting of politics along the lines of those who are high in authoritarianism and those who are low in authoritarianism.
So earlier, Dr. Weber mentioned the work of people like Inglehart and Norris, and you can measure authoritarianism in different ways at basic psychological predisposition and what you find is that it is associated with right-wing populist politics in a variety of places, even in societies that are relatively homogenous and don’t have some longstanding system of racial subordination the way the United States has.
So for example, you can look at Central European societies like Poland and Hungary. Those are fairly homogenous societies in ethnic and racial terms, yet authoritarianism, you can pretty clearly demonstrate that authoritarianism has come to strongly predict support for right-wing populist political forces in both of those countries. So the Law and Justice Party, for example, in Poland, Fidesz and Hungary.
So even in the absence of the durable system of racial or ethnic hierarchy, these things still matter. And part of the reason for that that has been argued differently by people like Inglehart and Norris but also folks like Larry Bartels is it really kind of depends on what political elites do to sort of activate the authoritarian predisposition and to get people to sort into different positions on it.
So one thing that right wing political leaders in places like Poland and Hungary were very much able to do was activate the issue of migration and its perceived threat to social cohesion. Now, neither Poland nor Hungary really receive large flows of migrants, even back around 2015 when Europe was experiencing a major refugee crisis.
So it’s not something that necessarily links to objective changes in population, migrant flows or what have you. A lot of it really depends on how political elites send cues or send signals about what are the major divisions in society, what are the major issues? And that in a sense also dovetails with what we argue in trying to make sense of why the white public has sorted.
Matt Grossmann: Dr. Weber, you all work at the intersection of psychology and political science, and I know that they sometimes are not fully aligned. I also know that you’ve done some work in moral foundations where there’s a huge psychology literature, but that seems pretty disconnected from contemporary political science work on ideological differences. Where does authoritarianism fit in that? Is this an example of the disciplines coming together? Is it another example of psychologists going their own way or political psychology kind of having its own niche, or are we bringing together the best of the disciplines?
Christopher Weber: I would say that we’re bringing together the best of the disciplines, but I’m of course biased. I do think it’s important when we think about these questions to adopt interdisciplinary approaches to understanding things as complex as sorting and polarization. Again, our contribution here is somewhat unique in that we’re looking at this relatively stable individual difference factor, examining how it varies in its expression over time.
We have, we as the working group, Chris Stanley and I, along history of doing work on authoritarianism in related contexts. So Chris and I have collaborated on kind of the intersection of authoritarianism and morality and how authoritarianism is expressed in terms of say the moral foundations. We’ve got a couple of published pieces, some collaborative with other co-authors showing, for instance, that authoritarianism is really heavily bound up in the binding moral foundations like authority and loyalty and purity, but much less so bound up in the individualizing foundations, so like an orientation towards harm or care and fairness. And so sort of creating a more robust framework for understanding authoritarianism, what it intersects with both politically and psychologically has very much been a part of this project and our broader work over the years.
I’ll say that communicating this work, I think communicating scientific work in general is a challenge but an incredibly important issue to take up. We live in this era of much misinformation and disinformation and declining support for science. And if we think about political psychology, public opinion, in many ways, I think we’re sort of partially responsible as a field or a subfield for not effectively articulating our results and it’s sort of contributed to this misunderstanding of what we study and its particular relevance if we think about public opinion research. I’m not sure that we’ve actually ever figured out how to describe things like sampling error, measurement error. You can sort of see that with almost like the reflexive rejection of all polling after an election.
And so it’s a work in progress and we’ll keep at it. But I do think it’s important when we are trying to understand these broader social trends like polarization and sorting to really understand how human psychology, in this case, authoritarianism maps onto this process.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn.
The Science of Politics is available biweekly from Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossman. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on the website: How Political Values and Social Influence Drive Polarization; Values and Racism in American Immigration Views; Are Americans Becoming Tribal, with Identity Politics Trumping All?; Is Demographic and Geographic Polarization Overstated?; and Reducing Polarization with Shared Values?
Thanks to Christopher Federico and Christopher Weber for joining me. Please check out The Authoritarian Divide and then listen in next time.
