Measuring Authoritarianism

• In Event: Personality and Predispositions

Abstract

Authoritarianism is a major individual-level factor in psychological explanations of democratic backsliding. Most recently, it has been explored as a key influence on polarization and the resurgence of populism. In this paper, we argue that the properties of the most used measure of authoritarianism in political science—the “child-rearing” indicators employed in major surveys like the American and British Election Studies (BES)—have gone mostly unexplored, with deleterious consequences for the reliability of the inferences made from it.
The absence of tests of the properties of the child-rearing measure appears to be due to the lack of data. However, BES panel data in which the four child-rearing questions have been asked in four waves, including in one wave using an agree-disagree scale rather than forced the choice between two values. These data permit examination of the child-rearing measure in terms of its reliability and validity over time, using Item Response Theory, as well as among different subgroups, e.g., race and gender.
In preliminary analysis we have found that the child-rearing measure is quite stable among individuals over time, but that the third item—whether it is more important for a child to be considerate or well-behaved—is both least stable and the weakest in its relationship with the latent variable of authoritarianism. We also find evidence of systematic variation in the reliability of the scale between men and women. We ask why, what such variation means for the measure, the implications for contemporary debates about the authoritarian dynamic, and offer methodological ways forward for measuring authoritarianism.

Authors

• Daniel Stevens, University of Exeter

• John E. Transue, University of Illinois - Springfield