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Following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Morning Consult was interested in better understanding the nature of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). More specifically, how are people who hold strong RWA beliefs different from those who don’t? Do people with strong RWA beliefs have different perceptions of major events such as the insurrection, the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 presidential election than those who do not hold these RWA beliefs? To examine this, 1,001 adults were surveyed in the United States. This sample was weighted to approximate a target sample of adults based on gender, educational attainment, age, race and region. Results from the full survey have a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

Morning Consult was further interested in understanding how the prevalence of RWA in the United States compared to its counterparts. To examine this, 1,000 adults were surveyed in each of the following countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Italy, Spain, Germany and France. These samples were weighted to approximate a target sample of adults based on gender, educational attainment, age and region. Results from these full surveys have a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

Data was collected from April 26 to May 2, 2021.

A Monmouth University Poll that was released in January examined RWA in relation to the 2020 presidential election. A number of measures used in the present research were adapted from this poll. 

Right, left and middle ideology. Ideology was measured using an 8-point Likert scale that ranged from 1 (Left) to 7 (Right), where 8 indicated no opinion. People were grouped into a “left” ideology if they selected 1-3, a “middle” ideology if they selected 4, and a “right” ideology if they selected 5-7. See Appendix A for the measure.

RWA index. Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) was measured using the RWA scale that was utilized in Monmouth’s research, and developed by Bob Altemeyer (e.g., see Altemeyer, 2006; Dean & Altemeyer, 2020). The 20 items were measured on a 9-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Very Strongly Disagree) to 9 (Very Strongly Agree). High scores indicated high RWA beliefs. Example items include: “Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs” and “What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil, and take us back to our true path.” Responses on the 20-item scale were summed to create each respondent’s RWA score. This resulted in a scale which ranged from 20, the lowest possible RWA score, to 180, the highest possible RWA score. (This summing approach follows suit with previous RWA research that has used this scale, and since we are bringing this study to new markets, we aimed to change as little as possible about the methodology in order to be comparable to the existing body of work.) Items where high scores indicated low RWA beliefs -- for example, “Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this upsets many people” -- were reverse-coded before being added to the index so that 1 always represented the “least RWA” belief and 9 always represented the “most RWA” belief. See Appendix B for the full version of the scale used in the present research. Reverse-coded items are denoted with an asterisk. 

Computing High and Low RWA. While the raw RWA scores are useful when comparing the distribution of RWA beliefs in a particular market, we created discrete categorizations of the RWA index to allow us to distinguish those who hold high vs. low RWA beliefs. There are several methods by which to create a “low RWA” category and a “high RWA” category, but we chose to leverage the global mean and variance of the RWA index across all markets to create the ranges that define “high” or “low” RWA. We simply took the RWA index global mean (i.e., of all 8 countries we surveyed in; x̄ = 86.6) and added one standard deviation (𝜎 = 23.6) to get the lower bound of “high RWA” and subtracted one standard deviation to get the upper bound of “low RWA” for all countries. This resulted in the following ranges that will be used throughout the remainder of the report: Low RWA = 20 – 63; High RWA = 111 – 180.

The choice to utilize the global mean and standard deviation is rooted in the goal of this study: to compare the rate and nature of right wing authoritarianism across countries. A true apples-to -apples comparison in the number of high and low RWA respondents requires that all respondents are judged by the same conditions, rather than creating country-specific definitions of high and low RWA, which would mask some underlying differences across countries. This results in the following proportions of respondents from each country that fall into the high or low categories.

Table 1. Percentage of respondents categorized as High or Low RWA, by country

As this is the first study of its kind to export the measures tested in this research to countries outside of North America, where they were created, it is important to understand their usability and reliability in international contexts. Therefore, we calculated Cronbach’s Alpha scores, a standard test of reliability used on indexes created from a series of Likert scale questions, for each country’s RWA index. Cronbach’s Alpha measures the internal consistency across items that make up an index or measure. The possible range of Cronbach’s Alpha scores is 0 – 1, with a score of one indicating the most reliable index and a score of zero indicating the least reliable index. In the table below, it is clear that the US, UK, Australia, and Canada are most similar and most reliable (all with scores right at 0.9). Germany, Italy and Spain’s Cronbach’s Alphas are a bit lower, but still adequate, at 0.82-0.85, and France has the lowest score at 0.75. Therefore the RWA index, while sufficiently reliable in all countries in this study based on this statistic, is the least reliable in France.

Table 2. Cronbach Alpha scores, by country

Digging into these differences a bit further, it becomes clear that there are a few particular questions that are driving this difference in reliability in France. Specifically, in looking at the correlations among all of the questions in the RWA index in each country separately, three questions in France stood out as having an average correlation among all other items in the index of close to zero. These questions pertained to religion and God in relation to morality (see items 3, 13, and 15 in Appendix B for question text).  Comparatively, in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, these questions all correlate with others at roughly the same level as all other questions, suggesting that these questions are driving the lower reliability of the index in France. This follows suit with research on this subject, where religion and ideology are often seen as separated in France in part because of its long tradition of assertive secularism.

Key takeaways

RWA breakdown. As can be seen in the figure below, those who scored high in RWA tended to be right-leaning, with nearly two-thirds (62%) of those who are high in RWA identifying as being on the right side of the political spectrum. Just 4% of those who are high in RWA identified as being on the left side of the political spectrum.

Those who scored low in RWA, on the other hand, tended to be left-leaning, with 7 in 10 identifying as being on the left side of the political spectrum. Just 4% of those who are low in RWA identified as being on the right side of the political spectrum.

These findings suggest that those who are high in RWA tend to hold conservative values.

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