Only authoritarian submission, aggression, and conventionalism covaried reliably in scale testing

Evidence

As I mentioned at the end of Chapter 1, the conceptualization of right-wing authoritarianism and the RWA Scale emerged from a post-crash analysis of the Berkeley model of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950). I simply noticed that the only parts of the elaborate Berkeley model that hung together empirically were “authoritarian submission,” “authoritarian aggression,” and “conventionalism” (RWA, pp. 16-25). Over the course of eight item-testing studies conducted between 1970 and 1973, I examined many other possible elements through hundreds of different items (R WA, pp. 156— 174, 277-297). Yet those three attitudinal clusters were still the only ones that consistently and appreciably covaried. They did so even when contrait items measuring their opposite sentiments were mixed into the stew. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 653

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the three core attitudinal clusters of right-wing authoritarianism that emerged from empirical testing rather than theory.