Authoritarianism predicted hard-line Communist and nationalist support in post-Soviet Russia

Evidence

McFarland, Ageyev, and Abalakina (1990) found that High RWAs in their samples tended to support the “distinctly conservative” Pamyat group and the Communist Party in 1989. The same authors in 1992 reported that RWA scores still predicted support for hard-line Communists (including a leader of the failed August 1991 coup). Boris Yeltsin was favored by Lows. In 1995 McFarland, Ageyev, and Djintcharadze reported that they still found RWA correlations of about . with support for the Communists (and Russian nationalism), and dislike for democracy, among 440 Muscovites interviewed four months before the battle at the White House in October 1993. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 503

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to vault claims that authoritarian followers back whichever faction is established/conservative — here even avowedly Communist and anti-democratic ones.
• QUESTION: High RWAs backing the Communist Party raises the question of whether authoritarianism is content-blind: support follows power/order, not ideology per se.