Postwar authoritarianism research studied followers rather than would-be tyrants

Evidence

But a funny thing happened to research on authoritarianism after 1950. It almost never studied domination, but instead focused on the many people in our society who seem ready to submit to a Hitler. This focus makes sense in that wanna-be tyrants in a democracy are just comical figures on soapboxes when they have no following. So the real fascist threat lay coiled in parts of the population itself, it was thought, ready someday to catapult the next Hitler to power with their votes. So investigators studied the submitters. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 894

Categorization

• DEFINE: Orients the reader to the field’s actual object of study — the submitters, not the leaders.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 894
• XREF: connects to: Postwar researchers studied American veterans as a test for fascism susceptibility — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 709; Early Holocaust research blamed individual authoritarian personalities, not social processes — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 40