Authoritarianism mappings predicted actual party membership almost perfectly in Canada

Evidence

The RWA correlation with left versus right caucuses across the four provinces was .87, one of the strongest findings ever obtained in the social sciences. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 511

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• SHARE: The .87 party-membership correlation is the kind of number political junkies would love to cite as one of the strongest social-science findings.
• XREF: Connects to the general literature on how personality measures rarely exceed .3 correlations with meaningful outcomes, a theme Altemeyer returns to here.

Related

• Authoritarianism and partisan affiliation correlate at one of the highest levels ever measured (similarity 0.91)
• Political party affiliation predicts authoritarianism better than any other variable (similarity 0.85)
• Political party affiliation strongly predicts authoritarian personality scores among Canadian legislators. (similarity 0.85)
• Canadian party candidates differ significantly in authoritarian orientation. (similarity 0.84)
• US party RWA gaps were substantial yet smaller than Canada’s (similarity 0.83)
• Canadian left-wing politicians show no more authoritarianism than conservatives (similarity 0.82)
• Actual legislators show extreme partisan differences in authoritarianism levels (similarity 0.80)
• Party differences in authoritarianism nearly vanished among sampled state legislators (similarity 0.80)
• Study samples showed greater authoritarian divergence between parties than students estimated (similarity 0.80)
• Right-wing party supporters show higher authoritarianism and social dominance than left-wing supporters. (similarity 0.79)
• No measurable authoritarianism asymmetry favors left-wing lawmakers (similarity 0.79)
• Right-wing economic views correlate with authoritarian personality scores. (similarity 0.78)
• Canadian Reform Party supporters scored highest on authoritarian and dominance measures. (similarity 0.78)
• High authoritarians will even attack mainstream right-wing parties the state targets (similarity 0.78)
• Right-wing authoritarianism scale scores outperform typical personality tests on predictive validity (similarity 0.78)