The Aggression-Submission-Conventionalism Scale: Testing a new three factor measure of authoritarianism

Abstract

Altemeyer’s (1981) Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale is the most popular authoritarianism measure today. However, the use of a unidimensional scale to measure a three factor construct and an apparent tautology between items and predictive criteria have garnered criticism. Revisions take one of two main approaches: either they simplify the construct to be unidimensional and create new items or they retain Altemeyer’s three factor theory and alter Altemeyer‘s original items to produce a three factor scale. We combine these two approaches by retaining Altemeyer’s three factor theory while creating new items. Our new measure, the Aggression-Submission-Conventionalism (ASC) scale, allows for a test of Altemeyer’s theory divorced of the original items. The ASC scale was designed to maximize discriminant validity while creating less tautological and more politically and religiously neutral items. A total of 649 participants in three convenience samples from the United States completed surveys showing the ASC scale to have good reliability and validity. The ASC scale was found to have similar predictive validity to other three factor scales but superior discriminant validity. Most importantly, we found a clear contribution of all three factors in predicting ethnocentrism, political intolerance, and anti-democratic attitudes. Authoritarian aggression emerged as the most important and consistent predictor with submission and conventionalism effects dependent upon the criterion. The ASC subscales all added unique variance above current unidimensional measures, with aggression consistently adding the most variance. Our findings support Altemeyer’s three factor theory and show that unidimensional measures fail to capture the nuances of our ASC scale.

Neoliberal Ideology and the Justification of Inequality in Capitalist Societies: Why Social and Economic Dimensions of Ideology Are Intertwined

“…Although some political scientists like this measure because it is thought to be devoid of political content (e.g., Feldman & Stenner, ; Johnston et al., ; Stenner, ), it has been criticized rather heavily on both methodological and substantive grounds (Hooper, ; MacWilliams, ). Among other things, scores on the childrearing scale have been found to yield insufficient internal reliability (Feldman & Stenner, ; Henry, ; Hetherington & Suhay, ), to be noninvariant across race/ethnicity (Pérez & Hetherington, ), and to exhibit weak associations with other established measures and known correlates of authoritarianism (Bizumic & Duckitt, ; Dunwoody & Funke, ). From a theoretical perspective, too, this scale captures very little of the rich conceptual and empirical detail of the authoritarian personality as described by Adorno et al.…”

Investigating right wing authoritarianism with a very short authoritarianism scale

“…First, the correlations reported between it and the well validated RWA or ACT scales have not been strong enough to suggest they might be measuring the same dimension (e.g., Dunwoody & Funke, 2016, r = .55; Hetherington & Suhay, 2011, r = .54;Smith et al, 2015, r = .38). Second, the content of the ACRV-2 items suggests that it largely taps the Authoritarian Submission facet of RWA and has no overlap at all with the Authoritarian Aggression facet (Smith et al, 2015).…”

“…The most notable of these are Feldman's (2003) 17-item forced-choice Social Conformity versus Autonomy (SCA) scale, Stellmacher and Petzel's (2005) 12-item Group Authoritarianism (GA) scale, Dunwoody and Funke's (2016) 18-item Aggression-Submission-Conventionalism (ACS) scale, Van Hiel, Cornelis, Roets, and DeClercq's (2007) 14-item Aggression-Submission (AS) scale, and a four-item Authoritarian Child Rearing Values (ACRV) scale (Feldman & Stenner, 1997;Henry, 2011). Several of these measures, most notably the SCA, ACS and AS scales have shown strong correlations with the RWA scale and been reasonably well validated as alternatives to it.…”

Ideological measurement in social and political psychology

“…Nonetheless, higher scores on such ostensibly ideologically neutral measures are still correlated with preferences for right-wing or conservative candidates (Duckitt, Bizumic, Krauss, & Heled, 2010;Dunwoody & Funke, 2016, Dunwoody & Plane, 2019Ludeke, Klitgaard, & Vitriol, 2018), with coefficients being around the same as those observed with traditional measures of RWA (Nilsson & Jost, 2020). This does pose a potential issue for the argument that ideological asymmetries are related to inherent political content embedded within scales.…”

“…It is important to acknowledge that there are some measures of authoritarianism that do not have explicitly political connotations (for a review, see Nilsson & Jost, 2020). For example, Dunwoody and Funke (2016) used items in their measure such as "We should believe what our leaders tell us" and "Strong force is necessary against threatening groups"both of which tap into the core authoritarian tendencies of deference to authorities and aggressive rejection of dissent, but without explicitly conservative policies being attached.…”