Authoritarianism, Politics and Hate Crimes (Summer 2019) Class ID:  2904

Study Leader:  Lloyd Stires (lstires@auxmail.iup.edu)

Osher Ambassador:  Robert Ludwig

Articles available on the internet (click on the links):

The California F Scale

The RWA Scale

Altemeyer, B. The Authoritarians. Chapter 1.

MacWilliams, M. (2016). The one weird trait that predicts whether you’re a Trump supporter.

Dean, J. (2017). Altemeyer on Trump’s supporters.

Lakoff, G. (2014). The strict father is at the core of conservative ideology and values.

Weber, C., et al. (2016). How authoritarianism is shaping American politics (and it’s not just about Trump).

Sides, J. (2017). Race, religion and immigration in 2016.

Benkler, Y., Faris, R., Roberts, H., & Zuckerman, E. (2017). Study: Breitbart-led right wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda.

Washington Post. (2018). The psychology of how someone becomes radicalized.  Arie Kruglanski interviewed re: Tree of Life.

Beauchamp, Z. (2019). It happened there: How democracy died in Hungary.

Videos available on the internet:

Taub, A. (2016). Authoritarianism: The political science that explains Trump

Lakoff, G. & Reich, R. (2018). In conversation.

Hetherington, M. (2016). Vanderbilt expert: Why authoritarians love Donald Trump.

Tesler, M. (2019). Identity crisis: The 2016 presidential campaign and the battle for the meaning of America.

Kruglanski, A. (2018). Countering violent extremism.

Suggestions for further reading:

Altemeyer, B. (1988). Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right Wing Authoritarianism. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Altemeyer, B. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Altemeyer, B. (2006). The Authoritarians. Lulu.  Available free at: https://theauthoritarians.org/Downloads/TheAuthoritarians.pdf

Lakoff, G. (2016). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (3^rd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hetherington, M. J., & Weller, J. D. (2009). Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. NY: Cambridge University Press.

Haney-Lopez, I. (2014). Dog Whistle Politics. NY: Oxford University Press.

Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network Propaganda. NY: Oxford University Press.  Available free at: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/network-propaganda-9780190923631?cc=us&lang=en&#

Tesler, M. (2016). Post-Racial or Most Racial?: Race and Politics in the Obama Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sides, J., Tesler, M., & Vavreck, L. (2018). Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle For the Meaning of America.. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2010). Winner-Take-All Politics. NY: Simon & Schuster.

Pape, R. A. (2005). Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. NY: Random House.

Kruglanski, A. W., Belanger, J. J., & Gunaratna, R. (2019). Three Pillars of Radicalization: Needs, Narratives and Networks. NY: Oxford University Press.

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future. NY: Viking.

Session 1 (7/3/19)

The RWA (Right Wing Authoritarianism) Scale

The test you took was the latest edition of the short form of the RWA Scale by Bob Altemeyer. Since the first two items are “warm-ups” and are discounted, it has twenty items. For half the items, agreement is the authoritarian response, and for others, disagreement. Each item is accompanied by a 9-point scale, from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” (In class, I mistakenly referred to this as a 7-point scale.) Scores vary from 20 (low authoritarian) to 180 (high authoritarian), with a theoretical midpoint of 100.

The test you took reported your score as a percentage of authoritarianism, between 0% and 100%. The midpoint is 50%. 25% is halfway between the minimum possible score and the midpoint. 75% is halfway between the midpoint and the maximum.

While Altemeyer taught at the University of Manitoba, the scale has been administered to thousands of Americans and Canadians over a period of almost 50 years. A typical college student scores about 75 on the RWA; a typical adult, about 90. In interpreting your own score, it’s a good idea to remember that you already knew what the test was attempting to measure. However, when people are asked to guess the purpose of the test, only about 5% answer correctly.

The RWA Scale has a test-retest reliability of .95 after one week and .85 after 28 weeks, which is impressive. It is also highly internally consistent; that is, all the items are highly correlated with the test as a whole.

Right Wing Authoritarianism is said to involve three attitudinal clusters:

• Authoritarian submission—a high degree of obedience to authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which we live.

• Authoritarian aggression—a general aggressiveness directed toward various persons, when that aggression is perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities. Authoritarians are predisposed to control the behavior of others through punishment.

• Conventionalism—a high degree of adherence to social conventions that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.

Critics have argued that an extreme left-winger can be just as authoritarian as a right-wing person. However, research doesn’t support this hypothesis, at least in North America. Altemeyer constructed a Left Wing Authoritarianism Scale, but only 2% of respondents scored above the midpoint. Other researchers have tried to construct measures of closed-mindedness independent of ideology, i.e., a Dogmatism Scale. But literature reviews find that conservatives are more dogmatic than moderates and liberals, who do not differ.

Some history: The Authoritarian Personality

Research on authoritarianism began in the late 1940s as an attempt to understand the rise of fascism, and especially anti-Semitism, in Germany in the 1930s. This research program was undertaken by four scholars at the University of California at Berkeley: Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford. Their research was published in The Authoritarian Personality (1950).

The centerpiece of their research program was the development of a test to measure authoritarianism—the California F (for Fascism) Scale. Since many Americans scored high on the F Scale, the authors warned that a fascist takeover could happen here.

There have been many criticisms of the F Scale and it is not widely used today.

• Some of the items are out-of-date. The RWA Scale was an attempt to update the F Scale using items that are meaningful to contemporary respondents.
• On the F scale the agree response is the authoritarian response to all items. Thus, authoritarianism is confounded with the agreement or acquiescence response set. The RWA eliminates this response set.

• The items don’t all hang together very well. Some of them are not correlated with the others, suggesting that the scale is not measuring a single trait.

The original theory of authoritarianism proposed that it had nine symptoms:

• authoritarian submission
• authoritarian aggression
• conventionalism
• anti-intraception—a general opposition to subjective or imaginative tendencies
• superstition and stereotypy
• power and toughness
• destructiveness and cynicism
• projectivity—the belief that wild and dangerous things go on in the world, a projection of their own unconscious impulses
• sex—an exaggerated concern with promiscuity

Through repeated testing, Altemeyer found that items intended to measure authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression and conventionalism were all highly correlated with one another. Items intended to measure the other six symptoms were not strongly related to these three core characteristics, and he suggested that they be dropped from the definition of authoritarianism.

Adorno and his colleagues explained authoritarianism using a psychoanalytic model of behavior that traces adult authoritarianism back to events in early childhood. Future authoritarians were said to be raised by strict, domineering parents who threaten and punish their children harshly. This generates hostility in the child, but since anger toward their parents is unacceptable, it is repressed, or driven from consciousness. This anger is then unconsciously projected onto various outgroups, creating prejudice toward Jews and other minorities.

This theory is difficult to test, since important precipitating events are said to be inaccessible to consciousness. Altemeyer found that authoritarians report no greater parental anger than nonauthoritarians, but a critic could always say: “Of course, they’ve repressed it.”

A third measure of authoritarianism: NES (National Election Study) Authoritarianism Index

This scale has been used in a number of national public opinion surveys. It reads:

Although there are a number of qualities that people feel that children should have, every person thinks that some are more important than others. I am going to read you pairs of desirable qualities. Please tell me which one you think is more important for children to have.

     _____ independence or _____ respect for elders

     _____ obedience or _____ self-reliance

     _____ curiosity or _____ good manners

     _____ being considerate or _____ being well-behaved

Respondents receive a score between 0 and 4 depending on how many of the authoritarian choices (respect for elders, obedience, good manners, and being well behaved) they make.

The main advantage of this measure is brevity, which is essential in a telephone survey. Since it doesn’t refer to any political issues, and can be said to be independent of political ideology. However, one could question whether it captures the full meaning of authoritarianism. It seems to measure conventionalism and authoritarian submission, but not authoritarian aggression. This scale correlates .68 with the RWA.

Demographics of RWA

A word of caution: If I tell you that Martians are higher in authoritarianism than Earthlings, that doesn’t mean that every Martian is high in RWA and every Earthling is low. There may be considerable overlap between the two groups. It merely means that the average Martian gets a higher score on the RWA scale than the average Earthling.

Gender: There are no consistent gender differences in RWA scores.

Intelligence: RWA scores show no relationship with IQ test scores or with college students’ grades.

Education: High scorers on the RWA scale tend to be less educated. When university freshmen are retested as seniors, there is a significant drop in RWA scores due to a college education. The drop is greatest among liberal arts students, second greatest among nursing majors, and there is no change among business majors.

Age: Altemeyer finds that the older people are, the higher their RWA scores. This can be interpreted two ways: The longitudinal hypothesis states that people become more authoritarian as they get older. The cross-sectional hypothesis attributes the difference to older people having grown up at an earlier (presumably more authoritarian) time. Consistent with the cross-sectional hypothesis, the RWA scores of successive generations of college freshmen vary over time. They appear to be influenced by the country’s political climate.

Altemeyer recontacted some college freshmen 12 years later. Their scores were similar to the scores of college seniors, suggesting that most of their decline in authoritarianism occurred during college. The RWA scores of married and unmarried people were the same, but those with children had higher RWA scores than those without children. This may suggest that the behavior of exercising authority (over one’s children) can lead to the development of authoritarian attitudes.

Religion: Religiosity and authoritarianism are positively related, even when excluding items on the RWA Scale that refer to religious practices or beliefs. Non-religious people have the lowest RWA scores; next lowest are Jews, followed by Catholics, while Protestants have the highest scores. Among Christians, authoritarianism and fundamentalism are highly correlated. Fundamentalism also predicts the authoritarianism of Jews, Muslims and Hindus.

A number of religious beliefs and behaviors are positively related to RWA scores, including self-reported frequency of church attendance, frequency of prayer, strength of belief in God, belief in heaven and hell, and belief that there is a devil who actively fights God’s will. Authoritarians are less likely to believe that “it is more important to be a good person than to believe in God.”

Prejudice: The RWA is correlated with racial and ethnic prejudice. For example, it is correlated with an Ethnocentrism Scale, which measures negative attitudes toward Blacks, Jews, Asians, Arabs and Native Americans. The correlation is about .50, so authoritarianism and prejudice are not the same thing. RWA scores are correlated .60 with negative attitudes toward gay people.

Conservatism: RWA scores are positively related to measures of political conservatism—in one study, r = .57. However, authoritarianism not the same thing as conservatism. There are two dimensions of liberalism-conservatism, social and economic. The RWA is more closely related to social conservatism. Republicans get higher RWA scores than Democrats, and this relationship has gotten much stronger in recent years.

Altemeyer has sent RWA Scales to hundreds of North American legislators, with a request to fill them out and send them back. Response rates tend to be about 25% for Republicans and 30% for Democrats. (Of course, there is no guarantee that the legislators themselves filled out the scale; it could have been a staff member.) Republican legislators score about 40 points on the RWA scale, a highly significant difference. Democrats show a wider range of scores than Republicans. Legislators from the South score higher than those from other regions.

The RWA Scale at the time of this study contained what Altemeyer calls his “Holocaust premise:” “Once our government leaders and the authorities condemn the dangerous elements in our society, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within.”  26% of American legislators agreed with this statement.

Session 2 (7/10/19)

Validity

Validity refers to whether a scale like the RWA actually measures what it claims to measure. The RAW claims to measure authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression and conventionalism.

Authoritarian submission

An example of authoritarian submission is submitting to illegal actions by your government. Altemeyer has given participants a number of different scenarios describing abuses of power by the police or the government, i.e., illegal wiretapping by the FBI. High authoritarians rate these abuses of power as less serious than lows.

Winters (2005) found that high RWAs were more likely to believe that the invasion of Iraq was a just war, and were more likely to believe a variety of (mostly false) claims made by the Bush administration about Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

Authoritarian aggression

Some of the few social psychological studies of real aggression were Milgram’s (1962) studies of obedience, in which participants were ordered by the experimenter to deliver painful and potentially dangerous shocks to another person as part of a (fictitious) learning experiment. (The shocks were not real, but the subjects believed they were.) He found that 62.5% of participants were fully obedient, a result that has disturbing implications for the potential of average Americans to submit to fascism. In a followup study, Elms and Milgram found that obedient subjects scored significantly higher on the California F Scale than disobedient subjects.

It is no longer possible to do experiments like Milgram’s due to ethical concerns about potential harm to partcipants. Altemeyer did a “Milgram-light” study, in which, each time the learner made a mistake, could choose to deliver one of five shocks, labeled from “very slight” to “very strong.” People who scored high on the RWA Scale delivered significantly stronger punishments.

A number of studies have shown that high RWAs tend to punish disapproved behavior more severely. In one study, Altemeyer presented participants with a scenario in which “William Langley,” the leader of a group of pro-gay activists, clashes with a group of 30 anti-gay demonstrators. Langley is convicted of incitement to riot, the penalty for which is 0 to 18 months in prison. Participants are asked to assign an appropriate penalty. In another version of the scenario, Langley is the leader of an anti-gay group that clashes with a pro-gay group. All other facts in the scenario are the same.

High RWAs exhibit a double standard by giving a significantly longer sentence to the pro-gay Langley than to the anti-gay Langley. The sentences given to the different Langleys by the low RWAs do not differ significantly. This demonstrates the tendency of authoritarians to punish unconventional people more severely.

Conventionalism

We expect a conventional person to conform more to social norms. Altemeyer gave participants the RWA Scale. One week later, he asked them to complete the scale again. They were told the average scores on each item by the previous week’s participants, along with the note: “Many students wonder how their attitudes compare with those of others. You may take into account the average response printed alongside each statement, or you may ignore it completely.” Both high and low authoritarians shifted toward the center, but the highs conformed about twice as much as the lows.

Global Change Game

The Global Change Game is a complex and realistic simulation in which large groups of participants are asked to role-play as citizens of various countries, and to negotiate their way though a series of environmental and political problems. The game was run twice, once with a group of 67 low authoritarians and again with 68 highs. Using the number of deaths as a criterion of success, the low authoritarians did a much better job of solving global problems. The high authoritarians started a nuclear war which ended all life on Earth. When given a second chance, they still performed more poorly than the lows.

The Development of Authoritarianism

George Lakoff—Moral Politics

At fundamental result of research in in cognitive psychology is that most human thought is unconscious, not in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but simply because we are unaware of it.  What we call “common sense” usually has a conceptual structure that is unconscious. Apparent differences of opinion between liberals and conservatives are the result of different models of the family that were taught in childhood. Conservatives have learned strict father morality, while liberals have learned nurturant family morality. Differences in political viewpoint are due to the automatic, unconscious application of these models to the nation—the nation-as-family metaphor. Failure to understand these models may help to explain failures of liberals and conservatives to communicate effectively.

Strict Father Morality

The strict father model takes the background view that life is difficult and the world is fundamentally dangerous. This model posits a traditional nuclear family, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family. He has authority to set overall policy, to set strict rules for the behavior of children, and to enforce the rules through punishment. It is typically corporal punishment. According to the model, this exercise of authority is itself moral; it is moral to reward obedience and punish disobedience. Punishment is good for children because it builds moral strength.

The mother has the day-to-day responsibility for care of the house, raising the children, and upholding the father’s authority.

Children must respect and obey their parents; by doing so they build character, that is, self-discipline and self-reliance. Only if a child learns self-discipline can he or she become self-reliant later in life. Once children are mature, they are on their own and must depend on their acquired self-discipline to survive. Survival in this dangerous world is a matter of competition, and only through self-discipline can a child learn to compete successfully.

Competition is a crucial ingredient in this moral system. It is through competition in a free market that we discover who is moral. Success in life is a measure of one’s moral strength. The nation-as-family metaphor is that it rules out any explanation of financial success as caused by social class or other situational forces. In this model, people always get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

Just as the strict father has a duty to protect his family, those who have risen to positions of power and leadership in society have a responsibility to exercise their legitimate authority for the benefit of those under their authority. They have moral authority.

There is a natural hierarchical moral order.  

• God has moral authority over human beings.
• Human beings have moral authority over nature (animals, plants).  
• Adults have moral authority over children. 
• Men have moral authority over women.  
• The rich have moral authority over the poor.  
• Not mentioned by Lakoff: White people have moral authority over other races.

It follows from this model that helping the poor is fundamentally immoral. It merely encourages them to be dependent. People must accept the consequences of their own lack of self-discipline. They will never become responsible adults if they don’t face those consequences.

Deviant behavior is also a threat to the moral order, since it calls into question traditional moral values. Someone who transgresses moral boundaries, i.e., smokes marijuana or engages in premarital sex, arouses justifiable anger and deserves to be punished by the society.

Nurturant Parent Morality

In nurturant parent model, love, nurturance and empathy are primary. Children become responsible, self-disciplined and self-reliant as a result of being cared for, respected, and caring for others, both in their family and their community. The obedience of children comes out of the love and respect for their parents and their community, not from fear of punishment.

Good communication is critical. If their authority is to be legitimate, parents must explain why their decisions serve the cause of protection and nurturance. Questioning by children is seen as positive, since children need to learn why their parents behave as they do, and because children sometimes have good ideas that should be taken seriously. (Ultimately, of course, responsible parents have to make the decisions, and that must be clear.)

The principal goal of nurturance is for children to be fulfilled and happy in their lives. A fulfilling life is, in significant part, a nurturant life—one committed to family and community responsibility. What children need to learn most is empathy for others, the capacity for nurturance, and the maintenance of social ties. When children are respected, nurtured and communicated with from birth, they enter into a lifetime relationship of mutual respect, communication and caring with their parents and their community.

In this nation-as-family model, the ideal world is one of cooperation, not competition. People are expected to be interdependent, and interdependence is a nonheirarchical relationship—hence, there is no heirarchical moral order. The legitimate authority of leaders comes from their acquisition of wisdom rather than their financial success.

The nurturant parent model requires that the children in a family be nurtured equally. Applying this to society, morality requires a fair distribution of resources, based on an assumption of basic human rights. Morality is empathy, and moral action is nurturance. In a world of empathy, the weak get help from the strong. Just a families are responsible for the nurturance of their children, community members are responsible for helping those in need.

Raising a child to be fulfilled also requires helping that child develop his or her potential not only for for achievement but also enjoyment. Self-nurturance is also moral. Since unhappy people are likely to be less empathetic and less nurturant, it is moral to pursue one’s own happiness.

The capacity for moral growth is a central idea of the nurturant parent model. When people transgress, they can be forgiven if they repent. Repentence allows for the possibility of moral growth.

Comments:

• These two models are ideal types; few real families are this extreme. Many families combine aspects of both models, as when one parent endorses strict father morality and the other believes in a nurturant parent.
• Lakoff believes that one can predict attitudes of liberals and conservatives toward any important political issue based on these models. Much of his book is devoted to spelling this out. For example, providing free medical care for the poor (“Medicare for all”) is seen as moral by someone with nurturant parent morality but immoral by someone with strict father morality.
• Lakoff believes that research in developmental psychology can be used to evaluate whether these models produce healthy and happy people, and that this research favors nurturant parent morality. For example, research casts serious doubt on the long-term effectiveness of physical punishment, and research on attachment theory finds benefits in the secure attachment produced by nurturant families.

Altemeyer’s research on development of authoritarianism

Like Lakoff, Altemeyer believes that authoritarianism is learned from our parents. In some of his studies, he has college students to have their parents fill out the RWA. The incentive is that the student gets extra credit points. The parental response rate is about 80%. The correlation between parents and children’s RWA scores is about r = .40, which is statistically significant, but still leaves a lot of variability unaccounted for. The correlation between students RWA scores and that of their best friends is r = .31.

Altemeyer has identified two consistent developmental experiences differences between authoritarians and nonauthoritarians.

Fear arousal

High authoritarians perceive the world as a more dangerous place. Altemeyer constructed a “Dangerous Persons” Scale, consisting of radicals, atheists, homosexuals, drug addicts, hippies, etc. (16 in all). Students were asked whether their parents had taught them that these were dangerous people whom society ought to control with punishment. (Parents were asked the same question and they tended to agree with their children on the extent to which they had taught them about dangerous persons.). Scores on the Dangerous Persons Scale correlated fairly highly with authoritarianism (r = .38). Authoritarians are not just afraid of other people; they report greater fear of auto accidents, catching contagious diseases, etc.

Life experiences

Altemeyer gave students a Personal Experiences Scale consisting of items such as:

• “It has been my experience that physical punishment is an effective way to make people behave.”
• “I have known people with poor manners, . . . and they seemed basically as good and pleasant as everybody else.”

Students responded on a 9-point scale. They were told that if they hadn’t had the relevant experience, to mark zero (the neutral point on the scale). This scale correlates very highly (r = .70) with the RWA. High authoritarians were more likely to fill in zeros, indicating a lack of relevant experiences. Those who had had relevant experiences scored lower on the RWA Scale.

He did a separate study just on experiences with homosexuals. Those who reported contacts with gay people said (a) gay people are just as good as anyone else, and (b) were lower in authoritarianism. The highs were more likely to have never (knowningly) met a homosexual.

These studies suggest what parents might might do if they want to raise an authoritarian child:

• Teach them to be afraid of unconventional people.
• Limit their activities and experiences outside their immediate family and community.

An important question is how people raised with strict father morality manage to break free from such an environment. RWA scores decline as a result of a college education. College may be an important source of diverse experiences. One hypothesis (not yet tested, to my knowledge) is that RWA will be reduced more if the student attends a residential college rather than commuting from home.

Session 3 (7/17/19)

Polarization

Polarization refers to the movement of people’s opinions away from the middle of a distribution and toward the extremes. Because different authors have used different measures, we will look at polarization that is organized along four different dimensions—liberalism-conservatism, authoritarianism, racial resentment, and white identity. These concepts are all highly correlated.

Polarization among politicians

In the 1980s, Altemeyer sent RWA Scales to hundreds of US state legislators, with a request to fill them out and send them back. Response rates were about 25% for Republicans and 30% for Democrats. Completed scales were obtained from 549 Republicans and 682 Democrats. The overall difference was about 40 points on the RWA scale, with Republicans scoring well above the midpoint and Democrats slightly below it. The Democrats showed greater variability than the Republicans, with the highest Democrat scores coming from the South.

More recent data analyzing US House and Senate votes show that legislators have gotten more polarized. The polarization is asymmetrical. Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats have moved left.

Polarization among the public

Studies have not shown any consistent tendency of the majority of the public to become more polarized over time. The parties appear to have polarized even though the public has not. The most likely explanation is party sorting. If, over time, conservatives move from the Democratic to the Republican party and liberals move from the Republican to the Democratic party, the parties will be further apart, even if no one’s attitude has changed.

History

Throughout our history, race relations has been one of our most important political fault lines. From Reconstruction to World War II, race was seldom an issue due to a tacit agreement between both parties to do little or nothing to help African-Americans. This agreement broke down in the 1960s. When Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he said: “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” He was right. 1964 was the last year in which a majority of whites voted for a Democrat for president.

Beginning with Richard Nixon, the Republicans adopted a “Southern strategy.” Nixon aide Kevin Phillips, author of The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), wrote that if Republicans would run against the interests of African-Americans, they could mobilize vast new white constituencies to vote Republican and eventually become Republicans.

Republicans and some Democrats have engaged in “dog whistle politics.” This refers to political messages (ads, speeches, etc.) that use coded racial appeals that automatically activate negative stereotypes of black people. These coded messages are not consciously perceived by the audience and can be plausibly denied by the speaker. They are grounded in psychological research on subliminal priming and studies have shown them to be effective in influencing potential voters.

Several example of dog whistles by presidential candidates were given in class. Dog whistle politics is an example of strategic racism. Those who practice it may not be racists, but they are using race pragmatically to appeal to racist voters.

The result of the Southern strategy has been white flight from the Democratic Party, primarily among whites without a college degree.

Authoritarianism

In their book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics (2009), Hetherington and Weiler report survey data from the National Election Studies in which participants were given the NES Authoritarianism Index, the four child rearing questions discussed in Session 1. Polarization can occur with respect to a variety of attitudes, but intense polarization is more likely to occur over “easy issues” that are understood at a gut level, such as authoritarianism.

Over the past 50 years, party sorting has taken place along the dimension of authoritarianism. High authoritarians have moved from the Democratic to the Republican Party, while low authoritarians have joined the Democrats. This is illustrated by the changing relationship between authoritarianism and both party preference and presidential voting. Authoritarianism has implications for several key issues—not just race, but also crime and punishment, family issues (feminism, gay rights), foreign policy (militarism vs. diplomacy), and more recently, immigration.

Not only does party preference vary with authoritarianism, it also discriminates between candidate preference within parties. In the 2008 primary contest between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, high authoritarian Democrats showed a substantial preference for Clinton, while lows had an equally strong preference for Obama.

Among the general public, authoritarianism increases during times of threat. Until recently, it was thought that threat activates authoritarianism and that high authoritarians respond more to threats than lows. But Hetherington and Weiler have shown that the opposite is true. It is low authoritarians who respond the most to threat. They point out that highs feel threatened by all manner of things all the time. Their behavior does not change when objective threat increases. But when there is a real threat, such as the 9/11 attacks, the low authoritarians begin acting like highs.

That means that the differences in voting behavior between high and low authoritarianss is greatest during non-threatening times, such as the present. But if a real threat occurs, or if a threat is deliberately created, right wing candidates will benefit.

Session 4 (7/24/19)

Spillover of racialization

In Post-Racial or Most Racial? (2016), Michael Tesler cites NES data in which respondents indicated their agreement with four items from the Modern Racism Scale, which he labeled racial resentment.

1. Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.

2. Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.

3. Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.

4. It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder, they would be just as well off as whites.

Racialization refers to the tendency of partisan preference to gradually become more structured along the lines of racial attitudes. That is, people high in racial resentment move to the Republican Party and those low in racial resentment become Democrats. This process accelerated during the Obama presidency. Prior to 2008, people low in political interest may not have thought much about the differences in racial policy between the parties. But with the election of a black president, even the most politically disengaged of our citizens noticed that he was a Democrat, and began to identify him with some of his policies.

The spillover of racialization refers to the tendency of people’s racial attitudes to influence their policy preferences on a variety of issues not directly connected to race, i.e., health care, tax increases, assault weapons bans, etc. Tesler’s strategy is twofold:

1. He presents survey data showing that racial attitudes are related to the policy preference in question, especially after 2008.

2. He presents experiments in which people are primed to think about Obama (or not), and are then asked about the policy in question.

For example, in 2012, attitudes toward government-run health insurance were more closely related to racial resentment than the average of previous years. In an experiment, participants were asked to evaluate a preliminary version of the Affordable Care Act. It was attributed either to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or no one in particular. Racial resentment predicted attitude toward the policy when it was attributed to Obama, but not when attributed to Clinton or nobody.

Racial resentment predicted voting choices for the House and Senate more strongly in 2012 than in the average of previous years. Between 1992 and 2012, attitudes toward race, Muslims and immigrants became increasingly correlated with party preference.

The 2016 presidential campaign

John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck, in Identity Crisis (2018), have done a thorough analysis of NES data from the 2016 election. Among the many articles specualting about why Trump won the election, two explanations stand out: economic anxiety and white identity.

The economic anxiety explanation attributes Trump’s victory to white voters who were out of work or whose incomes had been stagnant for many years. Trump’s biggest gains (compared to the 2012 election) come from states in which life expectancy has recently declined. These deaths have been primarily due to alcoholism, opiate addiction and suicide, the so-called “diseases of despair.” However, exit poll data show that Trump voters were wealthier than the average voter and much wealthier than Clinton voters.

Because not only attitudes toward African-Americans, but also toward Muslims and Latin American immigrants were activated by Donald Trump, Sides, et al use the terms racial identity or white identity to describe this campaign issue. White antipathy to non-whites has always existed among Americans. What was different about 2016 is that one of the candidates explicitly activated white identity as a campaign strategy.

Data from national election surveys show that white identity, as indicated by racial resentment and attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants, was strongly related to whether Americans voted for Trump or Clinton, much more strongly than in other recent presidential elections. Economic concerns, such as fears of not being able make mortgage payments or pay doctor’s bills, were only weakly related to how people voted. The data show that various aspects of white identity were associated with a higher probability of voting for Trump in 2016 than for Romney in 2012. However, various indexes of economic anxiety were less clearly related to voting for Trump than they were to voting for Romney in 2012.

To the extent that economics was an issue, it was racialized economics. Trump voters were concerned that blacks had gotten more than they deserve, and average Americans (presumably, whites) had gotten less, rather than about their own personal job prospects.

Question: Why do the media continue to emphasize the economic anxiety narrative, and why have they still not reported the real reasons for the Trump vote?

Session 5 (7/31/19)

Media in the 2016 Campaign

Benkler, Faris & Roberts, in Network Propaganda (2109), analyzed millions of internet articles—any story on any website, mainstream or fringe, that mentioned any presidential candidate, from 2015 to 2018. Using a platform called Media Cloud, they analyzed links between these sources using a mathematical technique, network analysis. They looked at how often one media source linked to another, and at how often these articles were forwarded via Facebook and Twitter. Their purpose was to examine the structure or architecture of the mass media.

This is a network map of all election sources based on internet media hyperlinks. The nodes, or circles on their maps, represent news sources. The size of each node corresponds to its relative importance, as measured by its number of links to other sources. The edges or links between the nodes represent relationships between them, such as the number of hyperlinks between media sources. For any pair of media sources, the higher the number of links between them, the closer together they are located by the model. The result is a map with clusters of media sources that share stories with one another and are read by the same people.

The color of each node is determined by the political leanings of the people who frequent them, as determined in a separate survey. Bright red nodes draw their primary attention from Trump voters over Clinton voters, by at least 4 to 1. Dark blue nodes are preferred by Clinton supporters by at least 4 to 1. The pink and light blue nodes are preferred by Trump and Clinton voters respectively, but not as strongly. Green nodes are about equally preferred by Trump and Clinton supporters.

Their maps show that there is asymmetrical polarization. There are two clusters of media sources. One is a group of far right sources that are closely linked, and account for about 30% of media inlinks. The other is a group of left and centrist sources that account for the remaining 70%. There is a relative absence of center-right sites that might have linked the far right to the mainstream. These maps are basically the same whether you look at links between media, citations on Facebook or citations on Twitter.

The consistent pattern that emerges from all of their analyses: There is not a right-left division of the media ecosystem, but rather a division between the right and the rest of the ecosystem. The right wing behaves as propaganda feedback loop—high insularity, susceptibility to rumor and conspiracy theory, and drift toward extremes. The remainder of the media ecosystem is anchored by organizations that adhere to professional journalistic norms. This produces a reality check dynamic that reduces their susceptibility to false information.

Two models of the relationship between the media, politicians and the public:

Reality-check dynamic: This is pretty much how we would expect the media to operate.

• Media deliver neutral, sometimes critical, coverage of politicians.
• Media deliver “truth” (confirming and disconfirming information) to public separate from opinion. Media police deviance from truth.
• Public has moderate trust in media.

Propaganda feedback loop

• Media deliver favorable coverage of identity-confirming politicians.
• Media deliver identity-confirming news and opinion. Media police deviance from identity confirmation.
• Public has higher trust in identity confirming media.

The key to the propaganda feedback loop is that right-wing politicians and their media tell the public that news that is not identity-confirming is “fake news” and is not to be trusted. As a result, people on the left and right trust different media sources. In fact, there is no overlap. There are several sources that are trusted by a majority of people on the far left, the center left and the center. Right-wing media such as Fox News are more likely to have their stories judged as untruthful by neutral observers.

Benkler, et al,, present a case study comparing false rumors of Clinton pedophilia vs. Trump rape. Initially both stories received approximately equal attention from partisan websites. The Trump rumor had a very short life. After one week, the Guardian published an article debunking it and it disappeared. However, the Clinton story was featured on Fox News, where it became the most widely shared and retweeted Fox story of May 2016. Although it too was debunked, it persisted throughout the campaign, eventually leading to an armed assault on a Washington, D. C., pizza restaurant by a right-wing extremist.

Only about 30% of American adults inhabit the right wing media ecosystem. Trump’s victory must have involved more than just right-wing propaganda. The mainstream media were involved. Patterson (2018) did a content analysis of news reports from 10 sources: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall St Journal, and USA Today.

His strongest conclusion was that the media have a negativity bias. While Trump got slightly more negative coverage during the election, Clinton got slightly more during the entire campaign. This negativity is not new; it is a long term trend that has gradually gotten worse. The negativity is not just confined to electoral politics, but is true of news stories in general. Patterson says the real bias of the media is not that they are liberal or conservative, but their preference for negative information. They have gone from skepticism—which is justified—to cynicism. Their persistent criticism of government helps the political right.

Trump received more media attention throughout the campaign. Trump was the subject of several scandals, but none received sustained coverage. His policy issues—trade, jobs, and especially immigration—got more attention than his scandals. The opposite was true of Clinton. Her scandal coverage exceeded her issue coverage by more than 2 to 1, and no single story received more coverage than the investigation of her emails. Although Trump’s coverage got less negative toward the end of the campaign, Clinton’s coverage got more negative, especially after the October 28 Comey letter reopening the email investigation.

When journalists bash both sides, is the effect neutral? It depends on whether the allegations surrounding Clinton were of the importance as those surrounding Trump. But no serious effort was made to evaluate the seriousness of the scandals, or of the candidates’ fitness for office. Media policy was to report all the ugly stuff they could find and let the voters sort it out.

There are two characteristics of the mainstream media that make it susceptible to being manipulated by right wing propaganda. The scoop culture caused media outlets to rush stories into publication that were not adequately fact-checked. False balancing refers to the journalistic norm that any negative story about one candidate must be balanced by an equally negative story about the other. False balancing also results in “he said/she said” stories, with no reporting of which side is telling the truth.

The Effects of Hate Literature

Altemeyer reports nine attitude change experiments on the effects of hate literature on university students, conducted by himself and several others.

The subject of most of these experiments was Holocaust denial. Participants were pretested on a scale measuring their belief in the reality of the Holocaust. Three weeks later, some of them read a slick pamphlet attributed to “Thies Christophersen,” who claimed to have been a guard at Auschwitz, saying that Jews there were well-treated and that none were killed. Belief in the Holocaust dropped significantly after reading this pamphlet (but not in a control group), with the average participant ending with only a slight belief in the Holocaust’s reality.

The most disturbing of Altemeyer’s studies involved four conditions:

1. The Christophersen pamphlet
2. A detailed confession by Rudolph Hoess, former Auschwitz camp supervisor.
3. Both of the above.
4. A control group that got neither.

The Christophersen pamphlet decreased belief in the Holocaust, while the Hoess confession had no effect in increasing belief. Among those who read both, the effect was to decrease belief in the Holocaust. This result was no different from reading only the Christophersen pamphlet.

Some studies find that participants high in right wing authoritarianism (RWA) are more persuaded by Holocaust denial propaganda than lows, but others find no difference.

Altemeyer has done studies with two other types of hate speech—attacking homosexuals and Women’s Studies education—with similar results. The studies show that hate speech seems to be effective, and they raise questions freedom of speech as a social policy. They also question whether truthful rebuttals are effective in countering false propaganda.

Authoritarian Leaders

The RWA scale was intended to identify authoritarian followers—people who would obey authorities they thought were legitimate. But what about leaders?

In 1994, Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, published a scale measuring Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). SDO is a measure of support for group-based social hierarchies in which some people receive better outcomes due to their gender, race, ethnicity, wealth, political power, etc. It is essentially a measure of belief in social inequality. Here are two sample items:

• Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups.
• We should strive to make incomes as equal as possible. (reverse scored)

One study found that, of 22 different psychological scales, RWA and SDO were the two best predictors of racial prejudice. But they are only weakly correlated with one another (r = .20). People high in RWA and SDO are both politically conservative, but they differ on a number of other dimensions. High SDO have less empathy for others, a greater desire for power, and are more willing to use manipulative tactics to reach their goals. Altemeyer believes that SDO is a measure that can identify authoritarian leaders.

In a series of studies of “ethical decision making” by Mark Zanna and others, participants played the role of corporate managers deciding whether to move their company from France to Argentina in order to evade laws against polluting the environment. Each dyad consisted of a boss and a subordinate.

In Study 1, half the time the leader was preselected as high in SDO; the other half were low in SDO. The follower was a confederate who always agreed with what the leader proposed. High SDO participants were three times more likely to make the move to Argentina (the “unethical” decision). In Study 2, half the time the follower was high in RWA; the other half were low. The leader was a confederate who always proposed moving to Argentina. High RWA followers were more likely to agree. Study 3 compared two types of dyads: (1) leader high in SDO; follower high in RWA, vs. (2) leader high in RWA; follower high in SDO. The dominant leader and the authoritarian follower were more likely to make the move. The authors refer to this as a “lethal” combination, which is found in many organizations.

Because of the low correlation between RWA and SDO, only about 5% of the population score in the top 25% of both scales. Altemeyer refers to them as double highs. They are extremely prejudiced and hostile toward low status groups. Because of their social dominance orientation, he refers to them as “aspiring dictators.”

Altemeyer suggests that double highs are more likely to be successful in right-wing groups. In most social groups, people who try to dominate the group are perceived as obnoxious and are disliked or ignored. But since they are double highs, they are more attracted to right-wing groups. It is there that they are most likely to be successful, since they have a ready-made audience of high RWA followers. (The paper on which this is based was written in 1998!)

Altemeyer did two runs of the global change game (from Session 2) with all high RWA participants. On the first night, there were no double highs. On the second night, seven double highs were included, one “randomly” assigned to each continent. Four of these seven volunteered to be leaders of their group, and two of the other three took an active role in governance.

Neither run of the game was very successful. There were no wars, but an unusually high number of people died of starvation and disease because the wealthy regions did nothing to help the poorer regions. The group containing double highs used most of their resources to build up their military power, and used that power to bully other groups. Altemeyer suggests that the double-high group’s session would have eventually resulted in a nuclear war, but time ran out. (Of course, this is speculation.)

Session 6 (8/7/19)

Radicalization

Pape (2005) complied a database containing profiles of all the suicide terrorists in the world (463 people) after 1980. Unfortunately, he excluded US domestic terrorists. These people on the whole were not poor, uneducated or mentally ill. He noted that 95% of suicide terrorists were part of an organized group attempting to end the occupation of a terrirtory they viewed as their homeland by foreign military forces. He recommended changes in US foreign policy, including withdrawal of US forces from the Middle East.

It’s not clear how this theory applies to domestic terrorism. It also fails to explain radicalization as an individual decision, the causes of which are psychological.

Significance Quest Theory (Kruglanski, Belanger, Gunaratna, 2019)

Three Ns of radicalization: need, narrative, and network

Need: The quest for significance—a desire to matter, to be someone, to have respect. Activation of significance quest can happen in three ways:

1. Significance lossA. Personal—deprivation due to personal failure or humiliation.

B. Socially-based—deprivation related to one’s social identity, shared by others in one’s social group.

2. Avoidance of significance loss—threat of shame or humiliation if one fails to act.
3. Opportunity for significance gain—opportunity to be a hero or a martyr; to have a place in history.

Narrative: For the need for significance to be satisfied by violence, there must be a violence-justifying ideology.

Network: Individuals are typically exposed to violence-justifying ideologies through social contact with relatives and friends. The internet has greatly expanded the size of the potential network.

Research

Kruglanski, et al, report a series of five correlational studies (from five different countries) in which they found personal shame or humiliation to be positively related to support for extremism. They also conducted experiments with US college students. For example, in one study, participants were asked to write a short essay about a situation in which they were humiliated. These students subsequently endorsed more extreme political views than control subjects who wrote an essay about television watching. However, these experiments are quite remote from the actual locus of terrorist acts.

Deradicalization programs

Kruglasnski, et al, describe deradicalization programs in several countries, i.e., Saudi Arabia, Iraq. The participants are prisoners who were either terrorists or former members of terrorist networks. To counteract significance loss, detainees are given jobs, apartments, or small grants upon their release. They also receive counseling intended to break down their narratives, i.e., a Muslim clergyman tells them that Islam actually condemns violence. Finally, they are put in contact with a network which provides social support after their release.

None of these programs have been adequately evaluated. They are not voluntary; continued participation in the program is a condition of release. There are no control groups, so when a person succeeds, it’s not clear whether it’s due to the program or simply “aging out.”

Implications

The more general a theory, the less chance it has of being disproven, but also the less useful it is in suggesting practical remedies. How can significance quest theory be used to prevent hate crimes? Seeking out and treating people whose lives to lack significance is a potentially open-ended process. Changing people’s narratives may be difficult too, since political ideologies are highly resistant to change. Breaking up networks may seem the most promising alternative, but internet-based hate groups show great resiliency in coping with the loss of their platforms.

Peterson & Densley (2019) have investigated a slightly different target group—every mass shooter (someone who killed four or more people) since 1999. This includes many cases not classified as hate crimes. They report four characteristics of “most” shooters:

• The perpetrators suffered an early childhood trauma or exposure to violence at an early age.
• They had an identifiable crisis in the weeks or months prior to the shooting, i.e., job loss, relationship rejection.
• They studied the actions of other shooters, used them as a model, and sought validation from others that their plans were justified.
• They had the means to carry out their plans—that is, deadly weapons.

The authors suggest such strategies as crisis intervention and gun control.

Prevention of hate crimes

The class discussed possible practical ways to prevent hate crimes.

There was general agreement that some gun control laws, i.e., background checks, assault weapons bans, “red flag” laws, might be effective in the long run, although there was pessimism about the possibility of such laws being enacted.

Censorship of the internet was discussed. Banning white supremacist or other far-right hate groups from internet platforms such as Facebook and Twitter seemed like too broad a solution, since most of the speech by these groups is not violent and is protected by the First Amendment. It could also be a slippery slope. Suppressing the speech of one’s political enemies often leads to one’s own speech being suppressed. On the other hand, removing content that specifically incites violence is impractical since it requires extensive (and expensive) monitoring of millions of communications.

Should there be harsher penalties for hate crimes? It was noted that in Germany, it is illegal to produce, distribute or display Nazi symbols. Holocaust denial is also illegal. Speech which denigrates individuals or groups based on their ethnicity or religion, or promotes violence toward ethnic or religious groups, is punishable by up to five years in prison. However, with the rise of right-wing political parties in Germany, enforcement of these laws has been lax. It would be difficult to get such laws passed in this country, since they would be seen as attacks on the Republican Party and its supporters.

There are many parallels between Islamic jihadists and white supremacists, although white supremacists have caused more deaths in this country in recent years. The Patriot Act passed after 9/11, allows the FBI and law enforcement to aggressively investigate foreign terrorists. For example, they can monitor communications between people—including US citizens—connected to foreign terrorist groups. These laws do not apply to domestic terrorists. US citizens can be charged with providing material support to Islamic terrorists, but not white supremacist groups. Congress could update laws to allow domestic terrorists to be treated the same as foreign ones, but what are the chances that Americans would accept aggressive law enforcement tactics against white targets?

There was some agreement that it might be useful to pursue civil penalties against groups known to have encouraged violence. Victims could sue these organizations in civil court, in the hope of bankrupting these organizations and their members.

The Big Question

To what extent is Donald Trump’s rhetoric responsible for an increase in hate crimes, or is Trump’s election just a symptom of other long-term societal trends? 

We know that there has been a dramatic increase in hate crimes over the past three years. However, it is difficult to draw conclusions from these studies. Since hate crimes are traditionally underreported, these data may be the result of increased vigilance by those expecting a “Trump effect.” These studies are correlational; other historical events independent of Trump could have played a role.

There are some laboratory experiments demonstrating that “accidentally” exposing participants to right-wing rhetoric, including direct quotes from Trump, encourages prejudice against minority groups. However, these studies stop short of measuring actual violence, which is practically impossible to study in the laboratory.

It’s possible that both Trump’s rhetoric has an effect and he is a symptom of long-term trends; that he amplifies something that was there all along. My nomination for the most important long-term trend is the rise of inequality from 1980 to the present. The reasons for the growth of inequality are largely political—rule changes such as big tax cuts for the wealthy or not raising the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation. Both the political parties are complicit in these rules changes. Causes include campaign contributions from wealthy donors and corporate lobbying.

Inequality undermines trust in government. Both Larry Bartels and Martin Gilens have done studies comparing what people of different income levels say they want their government to do with what actually happens. Most policy changes supported even by large majorities do not become law. Policy changes supported by the wealthy have the best chance of passing. Support among the middle class has no significant effect. Support among the bottom third of the income distribution is negatively related to chances of passage.

Wilkinson & Pickett (2009) have assembled evidence that inequality has a number of negative effects on society, including poorer physical and mental health, reductions in life expectancy, greater crime and delinquency, poorer educational performance, lower social mobility, etc. In wealthy countries, the effects of inequality exceed those of absolute income.

Inequality operates below the level of awareness. Americans greatly underestimate the amount of inequality. Neither politicians nor the media have any incentive to accurately inform the public about the amount of inequality, its causes, or its effects. Republicans have consistently attempted to get middle class Americans attribute their economic distress to the poor, minorities and immigrants, which is counterfactual.  Democrats have largely been silent on the issue, as have the mass media.

If economic inequality is so important, why did economic distress not predict voting for Trump in the last election?  Most of the people who were hurting economically voted Democratic, as has been the case for decades. The average Clinton voted was poorer than the average voter; the average Trump voter was wealthier. However, a greater than usual minority of the economically distressed did vote for Trump—those high in authoritarianism, racial resentment, and white identity.