Privilege and Marginality: How Group Identification and Personality Predict Right‐ and Left‐Wing Political Activism

Abstract

In two studies, we examine how different processes might underlie the political mobilization of individuals with marginalized versus privileged identities for leftwing activism (LWA) versus right-wing activism (RWA). In the first study, with a sample of 244 midlife women, we tested the hypotheses that endorsement of system justification beliefs and social identities were direct predictors of political activism, and that system justification beliefs moderated the mobilization of social identities for activism on both the left and the right. We found that system justification predicted RWA only among those who felt close to privileged groups; the parallel reverse effect did not hold for LWA, though rejection of system-justifying beliefs was an important direct predictor. In Study 2, we replicated many of these findings with a sample of 113 college students. In addition, we tested and confirmed the hypothesis that LWA is predicted by openness to experience and is unrelated to RWA, but not that openness plays a stronger role among those with marginalized identities. These two studies together support our overall hypothesis that different personality processes are involved with

Political party membership and personality characteristics in the Czech Republic (2005)

“…Members of only one of the right-wing political parties -ODSwere found to score lower in openness to experience than the population sample and there was no relationship found between openness and left-wing party membership. This only partially replicates the results concerning the connection between openness and left-wing activism (Blankenship, Frederick, Savas, Stewart, & Montgomery, 2017) and liberalism (Xu, Plaks, & Peterson, 2016;Gerber, Huber, Doherty, & Dowling, 2011), or the negative correlation between openness and the preference for rightist parties from other countries (Caprara et al, 1999;Schoen & Schumann, 2007). However, this might be because the simplistic left-right or liberalconservative dichotomy might not easily be applied to the Czech political parties: ODA and ED (referred to here as right-wing parties) were parties with many liberal issues included in their political program, and KSČM (referred to here as the left-wing party) is a party which celebrates the old times of the communist regime and rejects the new liberal society.…”

The Gay Right: A Framework for Understanding Right Wing LGBT Organizations

“…Like the concept "internalized homophobia," this theory suggests that gay people adopt both the right's values (e.g. children should be raised in particular kinds of families), and also the right's view that gay people are deficient in those values, therefore they support and justify the systems of their own oppression (Blankenship et al, 2017). In the same cell, but with very different views, are a what I call "homo-supremacist" theories.…”

Gender, Religion, and Pro-Life Activism

“…Studies suggest that pro-lifers are alarmed about premarital sex, think men should determine women's reproduction decisions, reject divorce for women, are upset when “boys act like girls,” want men to be protectors of women, demean homosexuality, think women are inferior political leaders, and object to women in the workforce (Granberg 1982a; Luker 1984; Munson 2009; Begun and Walls 2015; Swank and Fahs 2016; Petterson and Sutton 2018). Finally, pro-life activists also downplay the extent of contemporary discrimination against women of color and lesbians (Heaney forthcoming) and think the practices of widespread biases against women is of the past (Blankenship et al 2017).…”

“…Even though the empirical literature on abortion attitudes is vast and well established (Elder and Greene 2016; Kelly and Gauchat 2016), studies on the motivations of pro-life protests are much rarer, older, and mostly descriptive (Luker 1984). Moreover, these older samples generally lack comparison groups of people who did not attend pro-life events (Granberg 1982a; Wilcox and Gomez 1990; Gross 1995; Maxwell and Jelen 1996) and newer studies are limited to samples of current college students (Swank and Fahs 2016), middle-aged women who graduated from college (Blankenship et al 2017), Amazon Mechanical Turk Employees (Allen, McCright, and Dietz 2017), volunteers in pro-life pregnancy centers (Hussey 2014) or people who attended the March for Life in 2017 (Heaney 2018; Heaney forthcoming).…”

“…The socio-political climate and the organizing practices of the pro-life movement has slightly changed over the last several decades (Liss-Schultz 2018) and there is some evidence the proportion of people who call themselves “pro-life” have been slowly growing since 1995 (Gallup 2019). Second, the random selection of ANES participants has less selection biases than all of the pro-life activism studies with convenience or snowball samples (Wilcox and Gomez 1990; Swank and Fahs 2016; Blankenship et al 2017). Third, the sample includes a large number of people who have and have not engaged in pro-life activism.…”