The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer
Chapter 06
Authoritarianism and Politics
RWA, Social Dominance, and Political Preferences Among Ordinary People After all you’ve learned about right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance, you’ll probably be disappointed to learn that these personality traits connect only moderately to the political preferences of ordinary people. But the modest connections can be easily understood: people, darn it, are more complicated than psychologists want them to be.
First, a lot of people have as much interest in politics as I do in rutabaga—and for the same reason. These political drop-outs compose the bulk of that 40 to 60 percent of the population who do not vote in elections. That’s an awful lot of people whose RWA and social dominance scores are not going to correlate with anything political. Then one has the virtuous, heroic, cream-of-the-crop, super- dooper, world class heros, the Independents. (Uh, see note 19 from chapter 5.) The personalities of these party-poopers also won’t correlate with party preference, because they haven’t got any party preference.
Then come the members of the electorate who support a party but have very little idea what it stands for. You might call them political nincompoopers, but we have to recognize that political parties often make it hard to find out what they stand for. But some folks—not as keenly interested as one might perhaps wish—support the Democrats because their parents were Democrats, or their union says they should vote Democrat. Or they support the Republicans because “all the right people do,” or because they think the Republican candidate looks nice on TV. So with all these nonstarters and breakdowns, you can expect personality and party preference to often be strange bedfellows .
If you now have concluded that we could fit all the informed, concerned voters in your community into a phone booth, that’s not true. For one thing, very few phone booths exist any more. But for another, pollsters regularly find that a significant number of ordinary citizens appreciate the importance of politics, and may even be involved in the political process. Generally, men are more likely to be interested than women are, well-educated people care more, and the older you get the more you scrutinize the candidates with your weary, wary eyes. Studies show that the more interested people are in politics, the more likely their party preference will correlate with their authoritarianism.
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