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Authoritarian

Authority is institutionalized power. A power relationship is based on the ability to coerce compliant behavior if necessary. Without authority, power relationships develop according to status, knowledge, and informal characteristics. Authority, however, is based on legitimate foundations that formally establish structure and position within an organization. As social groups are formed, superior-subordinate relationships form. These power structures are perpetuated by tradition and eventually legitimized by law, statute, or formal rules.

With authoritarian leadership the leader or body of leaders determines the goals and rules of behavior of a group. Absolute authority is invested in the leader, and he is not required to consult the members of the group or to take their opinions into account in making decisions. The composition and functions of the leadership hierarchy (if the group is large enough to have a well-developed hierarchy) are determined from the top down. The major requirement of the membership at large is obedience to the leaders, and those in the leadership hierarchy are in turn expected to obey their superiors. Authoritarian leadership may be found, for example, in armies, dictatorships, industrial and commercial organizations, patriarchal families, and some youth gangs. The extent to which authoritarian leaders emerge and are tolerated with in the structure of democratic organizations is probably a good index of the weakness and superficiality of the democratic ideology within the larger social organization.

Even before the end of World War II, social scientists had begun to identify and quantitatively measure the Fascist personality. Research in this area was substantially advanced by Adorno and colleagues’ theory on authoritarianism, which was rooted in Freudian ideas. They concluded that the authoritarian construct relates to a “potentially fascistic individual, one whose psychological structure is such as to render him particularly susceptible to anti-democratic propaganda.”

Abraham Maslow is most noted for his work regarding human behavior and a hierarchy of needs. Need theory was first advanced by clinical psychologist Maslow in "A Theory of Human Motivation" published in the Psychological Review in 1943. According to this hierarchy, which has five levels, needs must be satisfied on the lower levels in order to move on to the next. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the most basic physiological needs dealing. This is followed by the need for safety. Next on the hierarchy are psychological needs, such as the need for belongingness and love and the need for esteem. The first four needs are described by Maslow as deficiency needs which can only be met by external sources. At the pinnacle of the hierarchy is the need for self-actualization, the level whereby one reaches his or her unique potential, which sounds a little trite today.

The appearance of these ideas in Maslow’s work reflected more general concerns with the rise of fascism and Nazism and the leader-follower research being pursued by the Frankfurt School. When Maslow saw his hierarchy as one of societies [Maslow, Abraham "The Authoritarian Character Study" Journal of Social Psychology #18 (1943) p.401-411 ], he simultaneously saw it as a hierarchy of countries, for some of whom authoritarian socialism is appropriate (e.g., Cuba, the Congo). Maslow wrote that "The more evolved and psychologically healthy people get, the more will enlightened management policy be necessary in order to survive in competition and the more handicapped will be an enterprise with an authoritarian policy."

In the late 1940s , renowned German sociologist Theodor Adorno, who fled Nazi Germany, developed a scale to measure the extent of receptivity to fascist propaganda. Adorno called it the F-scale; F representing the “the pre-fascist personality” receptive to authoritarian ideologies. The scale includes measures such as conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, religion and ethics, superstition, power and toughness as well as anti-intraception. Conventionalism suggests conformity to traditional societal norms and values of the middle class. The more individuals adhere to conventional ways of being, the more susceptible they become to authoritarian propaganda.

As Altemeyer conceptualized it (1988), authoritarianism is a product of social learning that is comprised of several complementary traits — submission, aggression, and conventionalism.

Three competing potential models can be portrayed based on the extant literature. According to the first, authoritarianism is a mediator between threat perception and exclusionism. This model is based on the crucial role that threat plays in the development of authoritarian views. Empirical support for this model comes from archival studies showing that citizens exhibit heightened authoritarian attitudes and behavior during periods of social unrest, and from some individual-level experiments.

According to the second model, perceived threat moderates the relationship between authoritarianism and exclusionism. Several empirical studies support this activation-moderation model. However, close associations between threat perception and both authoritarianism violatethe presumption that a moderation model is most appropriate when the moderator is uncorrelated with both the predictor and the outcome variable. It seems that this pattern of triangular correlations is more characteristic of a mediation model.

This leads to a third model where threat perception mediates the relationship between authoritarianism and exclusionism. First is the claim made by integrated threat theory that perceived threat is a proximal junction that mediates the impact of some individual characteristics, among which is psychological authoritarianism, on ethnic exclusionism. Second is Duckitt’s dual process model for the development of prejudice. This model suggests that authoritarianism expresses threat-driven motivation to establish and maintain social or group security in the form of social control, order, cohesion, and stability. Consequently, individuals high in authoritarianism should dislike groups that seem to threaten societal or group security. Duckitt’s findings support this model by demonstrating that threat perception fully mediates the relationship between authoritarianism and attitudes toward several threatening groups — rock stars, drug dealers, and feminists.

Religious intensity is often linked to exclusionism of ethnic minorities as well as to other non-democratic practices. Since authoritarianism stresses convention and obedience to authority, authoritarians may channel these qualities into their religious world, searching for ways to get closer to their authority figure or deity, as recognized in an early Israeli study. Historically, the perceived inherent incompatibility between democratic political ideals and religious beliefs rested on the idea that religion is about absolutes and liberal-democratic politics was about compromise and tolerance; hence, expressing religious belief implied intolerance toward dissimilar beliefs. But numerous studies have demonstrated that controlling for authoritarianism while testing for the effects of religiosity on exclusionism tends to make this otherwise positive relationship either non-significant or negative.

Modernization theory turned apparent truisms about progress into theoretical frameworks of stages of transition, from traditional, rural, and peasant to technologized and industrialized economies; from authoritarian political systems to participant oriented systems; from religious beliefs to secular, scientific values.