What do followers of authoritarianism believe? - Strategian: Science Magazine

What do people who support authoritarian leaders believe? Why do some people support political violence?

“For over 80 years, political psychologists … have studied the authoritarian personality—a collection of attitudes and behaviors that increase a person’s susceptibility to authoritarian leaders. We have found that authoritarian followers share three tendencies: they obey authority figures from their in-group (called authoritarian submission); they punish rule breakers (authoritarian aggression); and they rigidly endorse long-held traditions (conventionalism).” [Osborne, Danny. (2025). Why Some People Follow Authoritarian Leaders—And The Key to Stopping It. Scientific American.]

What does the research say?

Featured articles:

*Osborne, D., Costello, T. H., Duckitt, J., & Sibley, C. G. (2023). The psychological causes and societal consequences of authoritarianism. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2(4), 220-232. [PDF] [Cited by]

“Over the past two decades, citizens’ political rights and civil liberties have declined globally. Psychological science can play an instrumental role in both explaining and combating the authoritarian impulses that underlie these attacks on personal autonomy. In this Review, we describe the psychological processes and situational factors that foster authoritarianism, as well as the societal consequences of its apparent resurgence within the general population. First, we summarize the dual process motivational model of ideology and prejudice, which suggests that viewing the world as a dangerous, but not necessarily competitive, place plants the psychological seeds of authoritarianism. Next, we discuss the evolutionary, genetic, personality and developmental antecedents to authoritarianism and explain how contextual threats to safety and security activate authoritarian predispositions. After examining the harmful consequences of authoritarianism for intergroup relations and broader societal attitudes, we discuss the need to expand the ideological boundaries of authoritarianism and encourage future research to investigate both right-wing and left-wing variants of authoritarianism.”

*Dyrstad, K., & Hillesund, S. (2020). Explaining Support for Political Violence: Grievance and Perceived Opportunity. The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 64(9), 1724-1753. [PDF] [Cited by]

“What explains support for violence against the state? The surge in survey-based studies in (former) conflict areas has improved our understanding of the determinants of armed conflict. Yet, the potential interaction between grievances and political opportunity structure has received little attention in microlevel studies. Integrating common arguments from the civil war literature with the political behavior tradition, this article argues that perceived political efficacy, a central component of the political opportunity structure, moderates the association between individual and group grievance and people’s support for political violence. It represents a first individual-level test of the argument that perceived political opportunity structure and grievances combine to explain internal armed conflict. Using original survey data from Guatemala, Nepal, and Northern Ireland (2016), we find robust empirical evidence that support for violence increases with perceived grievance and decreases with political efficacy; and some evidence of an interaction between the two.”

*Crawford, J. T., Brandt, M. J., Inbar, Y., & Mallinas, S. R. (2016). Right-wing authoritarianism predicts prejudice equally toward “gay men and lesbians” and “homosexuals”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(2), e31-e45. [PDF] [Cited by]

“Two recent experiments found evidence for what we term the social category label (SCL) effect—that the relationship between right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and prejudice against gay men and lesbians can be reduced or even eliminated when the target group is labeled “gay men and lesbians” rather than “homosexuals” (Rios, 2013). Although this appears a promising approach to reduce self-reported sexual prejudice, with both theoretical implications for the meaning of RWA itself and practical implications for question wording for assessing these attitudes, there are several reasons to further examine these findings, including (a) inconsistencies with extant evidence, (b) small sample sizes in the original 2 experiments, and (c) concerns with the RWA measures used in the 2 experiments. We tested the SCL hypothesis with a nationally representative sample (Study 1) and close and conceptual replications of Rios’ (2013) 2 studies (Studies 2–5) using multiple measures of RWA and prejudice. Across 23 tests of the SCL hypothesis, we obtained 1 statistically significant and 1 marginally significant effect consistent with the hypothesis, 2 significant effects opposite the hypothesis, and 19 nonsignificant effects. A meta-analysis of evidence reported here and in Rios (2013) indicates that RWA strongly predicts antigay prejudice, with no significant variation by label. This confirms the typically robust association between RWA and antigay prejudice and confirms that the SCL effect is not robust. We discuss potential limitations of these studies, theoretical, methodological, and practical implications for our failures to replicate the original SCL studies, and future directions for examining social category label effects.”

*Osborne, D., Satherley, N., Little, T. D., & Sibley, C. G. (2021). Authoritarianism and social dominance predict annual increases in generalized prejudice. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 12(7), 1136-1145. [Cited by]

“Although right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) are the two most studied individual difference correlates of prejudice, debate remains over their status as enduring constructs that precede generalized prejudice. We contribute to this discussion using 10 annual waves of longitudinal data from a nationwide random sample of adults to investigate the stability and temporal precedence of RWA, SDO, and prejudice among members of an ethnic majority group (Ns = 23,383–47,217). Results reveal high wave-to-wave rank-order stability for RWA, SDO, and generalized prejudice. Adjusting for their between-person stability, RWA and SDO predicted within-person increases in generalized prejudice. Results replicated when predicting (a) prejudice toward three specific minority groups (namely, Māori, Pacific Islanders, and Asians) and (b) anti-minority beliefs. These findings demonstrate that RWA and SDO are highly stable over 10 consecutive years and that they independently precede within-person annual increases in generalized prejudice and anti-minority beliefs.”

*Thomas, E. F., O’Donnell, A., Osborne, D., Bird, L., Yip, L., Buonaiuto, E., Lizzio‐Wilson, M., Skitka, L., & Wenzel, M. (2025). Conspiracy beliefs and democratic backsliding: Longitudinal effects of election conspiracy beliefs on criticism of democracy and support for authoritarianism during political contests. Political Psychology. [PDF] [Cited by]

“There are widespread concerns that conspiracy theories undermine democracies. But do conspiracy beliefs increase criticism of democracy and/or support for authoritarianism? Or are antidemocratic people more likely to endorse conspiracy beliefs? To answer these important questions, we collected longitudinal data during two concurrent democratic elections—the 2020 US Presidential Election (N = 609) and the 2020 General Election in New Zealand (N = 603). Random intercept cross-lagged panel models tested whether conspiracy beliefs affect criticism of democracy in general, as well as support for authoritarianism, and both direct and representative democracy, specifically. There was little evidence that conspiracy beliefs temporally preceded changes in attitudes toward democracy or support for any specific form of government. Instead, people who supported authoritarianism more subsequently endorsed stronger conspiracy beliefs. The results suggested that, in the context of electoral contests (e.g., elections), antidemocratic people are more likely to endorse conspiracy beliefs rather than conspiracy beliefs fostering antidemocratic views.”

*Choma, B. L., & Hanoch, Y. (2017). Cognitive ability and authoritarianism: Understanding support for Trump and Clinton. Personality and Individual Differences, 106, 287-291. [Cited by]

“With Donald Trump the Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton the Democratic nominee for the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, speculations of why Trump resonates with many Americans are widespread – as are suppositions of whether, independent of party identification, people might vote for Hillary Clinton. The present study, using a sample of American adults (n = 406), investigated whether two ideological beliefs, namely, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) uniquely predicted Trump support and voting intentions for Clinton. Cognitive ability as a predictor of RWA and SDO was also tested. Path analyses, controlling for political party identification, revealed that higher RWA and SDO uniquely predicted more favorable attitudes of Trump, greater intentions to vote for Trump, and lower intentions to vote for Clinton. Lower cognitive ability predicted greater RWA and SDO and indirectly predicted more favorable Trump attitudes, greater intentions to vote for Trump and lower intentions to vote for Clinton.”

*Bilewicz, M., Soral, W., Marchlewska, M., & Winiewski, M. (2017). When authoritarians confront prejudice. Differential effects of SDO and RWA on support for hate‐speech prohibition. Political Psychology, 38(1), 87-99. [Cited by]

“Two nationwide representative studies (N = 653 adolescents; N = 1007 adults) investigated the psychological correlates of the intention to penalize public expressions of prejudice in the form of support for hate-speech prohibition. We presented participants with preselected examples of hate speech from the Internet and other mass media and assessed their willingness to support the prohibition of public expressions of such remarks. Both studies found that social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism are positively correlated with outgroup prejudice, but they have differential effects on hate-speech prohibition. Social dominance orientation was positively related to the acceptance of hate speech, whereas right-wing authoritarianism was positively related to hate-speech prohibition. In discussing this counterintuitive finding, we suggest that right-wing authoritarians are particularly vigilant toward norm violations—and this makes them more punitive toward counternormative expressions of prejudice, such as hate speech.”

Share this:

Related