Left-wing support of authoritarian submission to protect against societal threat

Type of content
Journal Article
Thesis discipline
Degree name
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Language
eng
Date
2022
Authors
Winter, Taylor
Jose PE
Riordan BC
Bizumic B
Ruffman T
Hunter JA
Hartman TK
Scarf D
Abstract

New Zealand's Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, adopted a "go hard, go early"approach to eliminate COVID-19. Although Ardern and her Labour party are considered left-leaning, the policies implemented during the pandemic (e.g., police roadblocks) have the hallmarks of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). RWA is characterized by three attitudinal clusters (authoritarian aggression, submission, and conventionalism). The uniqueness of the clusters, and whether they react to environmental change, has been debated. Here, in the context of the pandemic, we investigate the relationship between political orientation and RWA. Specifically, we measured political orientation, support for New Zealand's major political parties, and RWA among 1,430 adult community members. A multivariate Bayesian model demonstrated that, in the middle of a pandemic, both left-leaning and right-leaning individuals endorsed items tapping authoritarian submission. In contrast to authoritarian submission, and demonstrating the multidimensional nature of RWA, we observed the typical relationships between political orientation and authoritarian aggression and conventionalism was observed.

Description
Citation
Winter T, Jose PE, Riordan BC, Bizumic B, Ruffman T, Hunter JA, Hartman TK, Scarf D (2022). Left-wing support of authoritarian submission to protect against societal threat. PLoS ONE. 17(7 July). e0269930-.
Keywords
Humans, Bayes Theorem, Aggression, Authoritarianism, Politics, Adult, Female, COVID-19
Ngā upoko tukutuku/Māori subject headings
ANZSRC fields of research
52 - Psychology::5205 - Social and personality psychology::520505 - Social psychology
52 - Psychology::5205 - Social and personality psychology::520501 - Community psychology
44 - Human society::4408 - Political science::440809 - New Zealand government and politics
44 - Human society::4408 - Political science::440811 - Political theory and political philosophy
Rights
Copyright: © 2022 Winter et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.