You Know Those Studies That Say Conservatives Are More Authoritarian Than Leftists? They’re Basically Garbage.

You’ve undoubtedly seen those preening headlines from major outlets about how conservatives are more “authoritarian” by nature than Leftists. See, for example, here and here and here and here and here and here. But it turns out that this is nonsense. Such studies are generally vague and deliberately constructed to make it appear that conservatives are more “authoritarian” than Leftists. In reality, authoritarian personality types exist across the political spectrum. All you have to do is change the incentive structure in the questions, and you’ll suddenly find Leftists who hate freedom and conservatives who love it.

Jesse Singal of New York Magazine has a long and worthwhile piece about the scientific flaws in the authoritarian modeling. But the concept itself goes back to the Frankfurt School, members of which argued that Americans were members of an “authoritarian” mold since they didn’t agree with Marxist precepts about redistribution of wealth. Thus, for example, Erich Fromm argued that fascism would rise in the United States thanks to its devotion to capitalism — and that capitalism sprang from social structures that had urged “compulsive conforming in the process of which the isolated individual becomes an automaton,” breeding “authoritarian character.”