Klan activity surged during economic threat years then dropped sharply

Evidence

Because the Ku Klux Klan is an organization devoted to ethnic and racial hatred, we also predicted that Klan activity would rise during the high-threat years and then decline during times of lower threat. No direct statistics on Klan membership were available, but we counted the number of newspaper articles listed under Ku Klux Klan in the New York Times Index for each year from 1975-1988. By this indirect measure, Klan activity and impact produced a yearly average of 54.8 articles for 1978-1982, but only 15.4 for 1983- Threat and Authoritarianism in the United States 99 TABLE 3. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 813