Browsing by Subject "authoritarianism"

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    Race and Right-Wing Authoritarianism: How Scoring High in Authoritarianism Does Not Necessarily Lead to Support for Right-Wing Candidates
    (Wiley, 2017-03) Dusso, Aaron; Political Science, School of Liberal Arts
    Objectives Authoritarianism has a long history suggesting that it is primarily a phenomenon of the right. However, I argue that this has led to scholars overlooking the potential that, in some contexts, authoritarianism can lead to support for left-wing candidates. African-American voters in the United States provide such a context. A key component of right-wing authoritarianism is that individuals will support whom they believe to be their rightful leader. In the United States, who one believes to be their group's rightful leader is contingent on the race of the voter and the party of the candidate. I hypothesize that as African-American voters' level of authoritarianism increases, they will be more likely to support the left-wing Democratic candidate. Methods I test this hypothesis with a national sample of voters after the 2012 U.S. presidential election. I estimate multiple logit models predicting the probability of voting for Obama, the key independent variables being respondents' right-wing authoritarian score, their race, and the interaction of these two variables. Results The results present strong support for my hypothesis that an increase in right-wing authoritarianism increases the probability of African-American voters choosing Obama. Conclusion The results show that the effect of authoritarianism on vote choice is contingent on race/ethnicity. Too often, scholars have overlooked the potential that whom individuals deem to be their established authority is contingent on the political context. These results challenge scholars to provide a more nuanced approach to how authoritarianism influences behavior.
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    Racialized Religion and Judicial Injustice: How Whiteness and Biblicist Christianity Intersect to Promote a Preference for (Unjust) Punishment
    (Wiley, 2021-03) Perry, Samuel L.; Whitehead, Andrew L.; Sociology, School of Liberal Arts
    America's judicial system is both exceptionally punitive and demonstrably unjust toward racial minorities. While these dual realities are structured into America's institutions, we propose they are also partially sustained by the intersection of ideologies that are both racialized and sacralized. Using multiple waves of the General Social Surveys and a unique measure that asks Americans to choose between two forms of judicial injustice (wrongful conviction or erroneous acquittal), we examine how white racial identity intersects with biblical literalism to bolster America's bent toward unjust punitiveness. In the main effects, Americans who affirm biblical literalism are more likely to show a preference for convicting the innocent, as are whites compared to Black Americans. Examining interaction effects, however, we find whiteness moderates the influence of biblical literalism such that only white biblical literalists (as opposed to non-white biblical literalists or white non-biblical literalists) are more likely to prefer wrongful conviction. Indeed, in our full model, being a white biblical literalist is the strongest predictor of preferring wrongful conviction. We theorize that preference for wrongful conviction over erroneous acquittal stems, at least in part, from the combination of sacralized authoritarianism and perceived racial threat.