# Right-Wing Authoritarianism Bob Altemeyer's 1981 reformulation of the Adorno F-scale — a personality construct, measured by a multi-item Likert questionnaire, that captures three interlocking dispositional clusters: *authoritarian submission* (uncritical deference to established in-group authority), *authoritarian aggression* (hostility toward out-groups when sanctioned by authority), and *conventionalism* (rigid attachment to in-group norms and intolerance for those who depart from them). The acronym **RWA** is the project's namesake — and the personality construct it points at is one of the most replicated findings in contemporary political psychology. ## Why "right-wing" The "right-wing" qualifier refers to *psychological* right-wing, not partisan right-wing — though in most Western democracies the two correlate strongly. Altemeyer's usage: - *Right-wing* = aligned with **established** authority, in **traditional** in-groups, against **deviating** out-groups - The label means: this is the syndrome that supports whatever authority *is*, conventional in *whatever culture it inhabits* This is why high-RWA scorers in the Soviet Union supported the Communist Party (the established authority there) while high-RWA scorers in the U.S. support traditionally-coded conservative authority. The term is not a synonym for "Republican" — it is a personality construct that *predicts* support for established right-coded authority across cultural contexts. The recently-validated *Left-Wing Authoritarianism* (LWA) scale (Costello, Bowes, Stewart et al. 2022) measures the parallel syndrome on the left — submission to revolutionary or progressive authority, aggression against political out-groups, rigid commitment to ideological norms. Empirical literature finds both real, with RWA more strongly predictive of anti-democratic political behavior in contemporary U.S. samples; the asymmetry is itself a finding. ## What the scale measures The current Altemeyer instrument (RWA-22 and shorter variants) consists of statements like: - "Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us." *(submission + aggression)* - "Women should have to promise to obey their husbands when they get married." *(conventionalism)* - "There are many radical, immoral people in our country today, who are trying to ruin it for their own godless purposes, whom the authorities should put out of action." *(aggression + submission)* Respondents rate agreement on 1–9 Likert scales; scoring sums across items. High scorers cluster in the top quintile and tend to display the syndrome consistently across questions; low scorers tend to display the inverse syndrome (skepticism of authority, tolerance of out-groups, comfort with norm departure). ## What it predicts Decades of replication produce a stable empirical profile: - **Prejudice against out-groups** — racial, religious, sexual, political. RWA correlates with anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, and anti-religious-out-group attitudes. - **Punitive policy preferences** — support for harsher criminal sentences, capital punishment, military intervention, restrictive immigration. - **Anti-democratic political behavior** — willingness to support extra-legal action against political opponents, lower commitment to procedural-democratic norms, support for executive overreach against legislatures and courts. - **Religious and traditional-authority adherence** — strong correlations with religious fundamentalism (Altemeyer + Hunsberger 1992), with traditional gender roles, with authoritarian parenting attitudes. - **Susceptibility to authoritarian-aligned propaganda** — high-RWA respondents in experimental settings are more likely to credit propaganda from right-coded sources and discount evidence to the contrary. The Stenner / Hetherington-Weiler refinement: *predisposition* (the underlying RWA tendency) is stable across time, but *activation* varies with perceived **normative threat** — the perception that the in-group's defining order is under attack. This explains the periodic-mobilization pattern of authoritarian movements without requiring a change in the population-level distribution of dispositions. ## Companion measures RWA is one of two dominant instruments in this literature; the other is **SDO** (Social Dominance Orientation; Sidanius/Pratto 1994), which measures preference for hierarchical group relations. The two scales: - Are conceptually distinct — RWA captures submission and conventionalism; SDO captures preference for in-group dominance over out-groups - Correlate moderately (~.30–.50 across studies) - Have *multiplicative* predictive power for the most extreme prejudice and political-violence support — the dual-process model (Duckitt) frames this as RWA + SDO measuring different worldview-and-environment paths to authoritarian outcomes ## What "RWA" means in this knowledge base The acronym is the project's namesake. *Right-Wing KB* tracks the RWA-coded ecosystem — the political movements, organizations, intellectual currents, and operational vehicles whose work is most clearly aligned with what the RWA literature predicts: established in-group authority, sanctioned aggression against out-groups, and rigid conventionalism, in their contemporary American forms. The personality-construct sense and the political-movement sense reinforce each other in this usage: the people scoring high on RWA scales are the same population the right-wing ecosystem targets, mobilizes, and serves. ## Critiques The RWA scale has been refined and contested: - **Item content drifting toward outcomes.** Some critics argue the scale's items partially measure the political outcomes it claims to predict, producing circular validation. Altemeyer's defenders argue the items measure dispositions toward authority, conventionalism, and out-group aggression in the abstract — and that finding these correlated with right-coded political outcomes is the substantive finding, not a circularity. - **Cultural specificity.** RWA travels across Western democracies but performs differently in non-Western contexts; cross-cultural validation is ongoing. - **Item directionality.** The original F-scale was criticized for response-set bias (all items keyed in one direction); Altemeyer corrected for this with reverse-coded items, but some response-style critique persists. ## See Also - [[Bob Altemeyer]] — the scale's developer - [[Authoritarianism]] — the categorized framework view - [[Authoritarianism (Term)]] — the umbrella term across all three levels - [[Authoritarian Personality Theory]] — the broader research framework - [[Anti-Intraception]] — F-scale dimension - [[Aggrieved Entitlement]] — Kimmel's complementary construct - [[Authoritarianism Lexicon]] — alphabetical MOC