Radicalism-Conservatism Scale

Abstract

The Radicalism-Conservatism Scale (RCS), developed by psychometrician Andrew L. Comrey and John A. Newmeyer in 1965, represents a seminal psychometric instrument designed to assess sociopolitical ideology along a unified, multidimensional bipolar continuum. Built in an era marked by intense political realignment, the Cold War, and civil rights mobilizations, the RCS operationalized the latent structure underlying ideological self-placement through rigorous factor-analytic methodology. Comprising two parallel 30-item instruments (Form A and Form B), the RCS assesses 13 distinct sociopolitical and moral domains: Religiosity, Pacifism, Welfarism, Anti-unionism, Weak Federal Government (states' rights and free-market capitalism), Moral Censorship, Contraception/Reproductive Freedom, Racial Tolerance, Severe Treatment of Criminals, Capital Punishment, Service to Country (patriotism and militarism), World Government, and Service to the Individual. Respondents evaluate statements utilizing a 9-point Likert-type response scale ranging from 1 (agree very strongly) to 9 (disagree very strongly). Extensive psychometric validation demonstrated robust internal consistency across both parallel forms (split-half coefficients and parallel-form correlations routinely exceeding $r = .85$), alongside pronounced convergent validity with political party identification, voting behavior, and related psychometric constructs such as Right-Wing Authoritarianism and social dominance attitudes. Factor-analytic extraction consistently isolates a dominant second-order super-factor representing generalized Radicalism versus Conservatism, which accounts for substantial shared variance across divergent attitudinal sub-facets. This article provides a comprehensive psychometric review of the RCS, detailing its theoretical heritage, latent construct architecture, empirical validity, reliability metrics, scoring algorithms, and historical impact within political psychology and survey research methodology.

Keywords

Radicalism-Conservatism Scale, Andrew L. Comrey, Political Ideology, Conservatism, Radicalism, Psychometrics, Factor Analysis, Attitude Measurement, Social Psychology, Parallel Forms Reliability

Authors

The Radicalism-Conservatism Scale was formulated and standardized by two prominent researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA):

• Andrew L. Comrey, Ph.D.: Professor of Psychology at UCLA, an internationally renowned psychometrician, multivariate statistician, and author of the widely used Comrey Personality Scales (CPS). Comrey was a leading pioneer in exploratory factor analysis, developing innovative analytic rotation techniques (such as the tandem criteria) and establishing empirical standards for factoring homogeneous item dimensions.
• John A. Newmeyer, Ph.D.: Research psychologist and statistician associated with UCLA's Department of Psychology during the development of the scale, who later conducted extensive epidemiological, public health, and social psychology research at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco, California.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Radicalism-Conservatism Scale is to provide an empirically grounded, psychometrically standardized measure of individual differences in socio-political and economic ideology. During the mid-twentieth century, the assessment of ideological attitudes was dominated by instruments that either confounded ideological content with psychopathology—such as the California F-Scale developed by Adorno and colleagues (The Authoritarian Personality)—or failed to implement rigorous modern factor-analytic controls to guard against item heterogeneity, acquiescence response set, and dimensional instability.

Comrey and Newmeyer designed the RCS to overcome these methodological limitations. Their objective was to ascertain whether heterogeneous socio-political attitudes—ranging from theological beliefs and moral censorship to military foreign policy and welfare state economics—coalesced into a coherent, unitary higher-order dimension of Radicalism-Conservatism, or whether political attitudes operated as orthogonal, independent ideological traits. By crafting two psychometrically parallel forms (Form A and Form B), the authors also intended to furnish researchers with interchangeable batteries suitable for longitudinal investigations, pre-post experimental designs, and split-ballot survey research without introducing item-exposure artifacts.

In applied and research contexts, the RCS has been extensively utilized in political science, organizational behavior, sociology, and social psychology. It enables researchers to:

• Quantify the degree of ideological rigidity versus progressive flexibility across diverse demographic, regional, and socioeconomic strata.
• Investigate the psychological underpinnings of voting behavior, policy preferences, and legislative decision-making.
• Assess the relationship between basic personality traits (such as Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism) and generalized social attitudes.
• Examine the cross-generational transmission and developmental trajectories of sociopolitical attitudes across the adult lifespan.

Psychological Construct

The central construct measured by the RCS is Radicalism-Conservatism, conceptualized as a bipolar latent continuum of sociopolitical orientation. In Comrey and Newmeyer's framework, Conservatism reflects a psychological and behavioral disposition toward the preservation of established institutional orders, deference to traditional religious and moral authority, national sovereignty, punitive legal deterrence, and unrestricted free-enterprise capitalism. Conversely, Radicalism (operationally equivalent in modern nomenclature to progressive liberalism or left-wing egalitarianism) denotes an openness to fundamental socio-structural transformation, secularism, individual autonomy in private morality, international cooperation, and state-mediated redistributive social welfare.

To capture this broad construct comprehensively, the RCS systematically incorporates 13 operationalized sub-facets across both parallel forms:

• Religiosity: Endorsement of orthodox Judeo-Christian theological tenets, the divine authority of scripture, creationism, and the integration of religious dogma into civic education and daily societal governance.
• Pacifism: Attitudes toward national disarmament, non-violent foreign engagement, and unilateral non-aggression, contrasted with military deterrence and preemptive warfare.
• Welfarism: Support for progressive government intervention aimed at wealth redistribution, economic safety nets, and the fundamental right of all citizens to basic subsistence.
• Anti-unionism: Skepticism toward organized labor, highlighting union corruption, coercive strike tactics, and perceived impediments to industrial efficiency and economic productivity.
• Weak Federal Government: Advocacy for localism, states' rights, deregulation of private enterprise, and deep resistance to the expansion of centralized administrative governance.
• Moral Censorship: The conviction that the state and community authorities must suppress sexually explicit media, penalize non-marital sexual behaviors, and censor literature deemed offensive or subversive to public decency.
• Contraception and Reproductive Freedom: Acceptance of reproductive autonomy, accessibility to family planning technologies, and the legalization of elective abortion.
• Racial Tolerance: Support for non-discriminatory civil rights, equal employment opportunity mandates, and the societal integration and acceptance of interracial relationships.
• Severe Treatment of Criminals: Punitive penological orientations favoring mandatory minimums, extended incarceration (such as habitual offender statutes), and the curtailment of procedural protections for criminal defendants.
• Capital Punishment: Endorsement of state-sanctioned execution as a morally appropriate, deterrent, and retributive response to capital felonies.
• Service to Country: Uncompromising civic and military patriotism, mandatory conscription, and the prioritization of national honor above individual self-preservation.
• World Government: Support for internationalist governance structures, the strengthening of the United Nations, and the voluntary surrender of national sovereignty to secure global stability.
• Service to the Individual: A libertarian and humanist valuation of individual civil rights, welfare, and personal liberty over the collective demands and sovereign hegemony of the nation-state.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Radicalism-Conservatism Scale is grounded in the pioneering psychometric tradition of attitude measurement established by L. L. Thurstone (1928), Leonard W. Ferguson (1939), and Hans J. Eysenck (1944, 1954). Thurstone's law of comparative judgment first demonstrated that subjective sociopolitical sentiments could be quantified with mathematical precision along continuous psychological intervals.

Ferguson's structural analysis of primary social attitudes subsequently isolated three fundamental factors: Religionism, Humanitarianism, and Nationalism. However, it was Hans J. Eysenck who formalized the two-dimensional model of sociopolitical ideology, identifying two orthogonal axes: Radicalism-Conservatism (R-factor) and Tough-Mindedness versus Tender-Mindedness (T-factor). Eysenck postulated that the R-factor represents the core content of ideological allegiance—subsuming economic, religious, and political policies—whereas the T-factor captures a stylistic or temperamental dimension governing how rigidly or aggressively those beliefs are held.

Comrey and Newmeyer (1965) synthesized this psychometric lineage while adopting Comrey's refined Factored Homogeneous Item Dimension (FHID) methodology. This methodology posits that complex personality and attitudinal super-factors are constituted by stable, intercorrelated clusters of highly specific behaviors and opinions. Rejecting purely psychoanalytic or pathological conceptualizations of conservatism—such as the dynamic ego-defensive hypotheses advanced in The Authoritarian Personality—Comrey and Newmeyer framed political ideology as a normative structure of learned social attitudes. According to their theoretical rationale, when diverse social issues are subjected to factor analysis, cognitive and cultural pressures toward ideological consistency (what Philip Converse later termed ideological "constraint") cause specific attitudes to coalesce into a powerful, generalized bipolar dimension.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Radicalism-Conservatism Scale has been established through construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related empirical investigations across diverse adult and student cohorts.

Construct and Factorial Validity

In their initial standardization sample of 212 subjects, Comrey and Newmeyer demonstrated that the 13 a priori attitude clusters exhibited substantial intercorrelations in hypothesized directions. Religiosity, severe treatment of criminals, capital punishment, moral censorship, service to country, anti-unionism, and weak federal government demonstrated significant positive intercorrelations, forming a cohesive conservative pole. Conversely, welfarism, pacifism, contraception, racial tolerance, world government, and service to the individual loaded consistently on the radical pole. Subsequent confirmatory investigations reported in John P. Robinson and Phillip R. Shaver's landmark compendium, Measures of Political Attitudes (1969), reaffirmed that a generalized, unrotated first principal component or second-order factor accounted for upwards of 40% to 50% of the common variance among the subscales.

Convergent and Criterion-Related Validity

The RCS exhibits robust convergent validity when evaluated against external behavioral and demographic criteria:

• Political Party Affiliation: Form A and Form B total scores discriminate decisively between registered members of conservative parties (e.g., the Republican Party) and liberal/radical organizations (e.g., the Democratic Party, socialist student groups), yielding substantial effect sizes ($t > 8.50, p < .001$).
• Voting Preference: Criterion validity was substantiated by the scale's capacity to predict electoral choices in presidential and local elections; higher conservative scores strongly correlated with voting for conservative political candidates ($r = .62$ to $.74$).
• Convergence with Related Scales: The RCS demonstrates high convergent correlations with alternative measures of political conservatism, such as the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale ($r > .70$) and contemporary measures of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) ($r = .65$ to $.78$).

Discriminant Validity

The scale demonstrates adequate discriminant validity against measures of general cognitive ability (e.g., Wonderlic Personnel Test, Miller Analogies Test), showing negligible correlations ($r = -.08$ to $.12$). Furthermore, Comrey and Newmeyer ensured that the parallel forms minimized confounding with acquiescence response set by incorporating systematically reversed items, ensuring that the primary factor reflects substantive attitudinal variance rather than mechanical response styles.

Reliability

The Radicalism-Conservatism Scale possesses excellent psychometric reliability across internal consistency, parallel-forms equivalence, and temporal stability metrics.

Parallel-Form Equivalence

A central design feature of the RCS is the exact structural alignment between Form A and Form B. When administered concurrently or in immediate succession to standardization samples, the correlation between Form A and Form B total scores ranged from $r = .85$ to $r = .91$, indicating high parallel-form equivalence. This allows researchers to utilize either form interchangeably without compromising measurement calibration.

Internal Consistency

Split-half reliability coefficients, corrected via the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula, yielded estimates between $.87$ and $.93$ for the total 30-item composite scores across both forms. Individual subscales (which typically consist of two to four items each) demonstrate lower, yet psychometrically acceptable, internal consistency estimates (Cronbach's $\alpha$ ranging from $.58$ to $.82$), reflecting the deliberate brevity of each specific sub-facet battery.

Test-Retest Stability

In temporal stability evaluations spanning four- to eight-week test-retest intervals, the RCS demonstrated remarkable stability among adult populations, with test-retest reliability coefficients routinely falling between $r_{tt} = .82$ and $r_{tt} = .89$. These metrics confirm that the RCS measures a stable, enduring sociopolitical orientation rather than transient, situational mood fluctuations.

Factor Analysis

The developmental psychometric architecture of the RCS was guided by rigorous factor-analytic extraction. Comrey and Newmeyer (1965) submitted the intercorrelations of the 13 hypothesized attitude sub-areas to an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) utilizing principal component extraction followed by orthogonal and oblique analytic rotations (specifically employing Comrey's tandem criteria and Varimax rotation).

Primary Factor Loadings

The initial factor matrix revealed a massive first unrotated factor accounting for a predominant share of total variance. Following rotation, several clear, interpretable primary factors emerged, which directly corresponded to the theoretical dimensions:

• Religious and Moral Traditionalism: High positive loadings from Religiosity ($lambda = .74$), Moral Censorship ($lambda = .68$), and negative loadings from Contraception/Abortion ($lambda = -.61$).
• Punitiveness and State Authority: Marked by Severe Treatment of Criminals ($lambda = .71$), Capital Punishment ($lambda = .69$), and Service to Country ($lambda = .55$).
• Economic and Welfare Orientation: Dominated by Welfarism ($lambda = -.72$), Anti-unionism ($lambda = .64$), and Weak Federal Government ($lambda = .58$).
• Internationalism and Human Rights: Characterized by World Government ($lambda = -.66$), Pacifism ($lambda = -.63$), Racial Tolerance ($lambda = -.54$), and Service to the Individual ($lambda = -.51$).

Second-Order Super-Factor

When the oblique intercorrelations among these primary factors were factored at the second order, a single, definitive higher-order factor emerged. This second-order latent trait exhibited high loadings from all primary dimensions, demonstrating empirically that individual positions on moral, economic, international, and punitive issues are bound together by an overarching latent axis: Radicalism-Conservatism.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structural characteristics of the Radicalism-Conservatism Scale are outlined below:

• Instrument Type: Standardized self-report sociopolitical attitude inventory.
• Forms Available: Two psychometrically parallel forms (Form A and Form B), each containing 30 manifest items.
• Administration Format: Individual or group paper-and-pencil or computer-assisted administration.
• Target Population: Adolescents (ages 16+) and adults across general, collegiate, and specialized organizational populations.
• Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes per form.
• Response Scale: An authentic 9-point Likert-type agreement continuum:
  • 1 = Agree very strongly
  • 2 = Agree strongly
  • 3 = Agree moderately
  • 4 = Agree slightly
  • 5 = Neither agree nor disagree (Neutral)
  • 6 = Disagree slightly
  • 7 = Disagree moderately
  • 8 = Disagree strongly
  • 9 = Disagree very strongly
• Scoring and Directionality:
  • Items marked with an asterisk (*) are reversed-keyed items representing radical/progressive orientations.
  • For non-reversed items (indicative of conservative ideology), a response of 1 receives 9 points, 2 receives 8 points, …, down to 9 receiving 1 point (or retained on raw scale depending on scoring convention). Under standard scoring protocols, higher total composite scores represent greater Conservatism, while lower scores denote greater Radicalism.
  • For reversed items (*), scoring direction is reversed (e.g., raw score 1 remains 1, indicating radical alignment).
  • Total scale scores range from 30 to 270 points, with subscale scores calculated by summing the keyed items within each of the 13 defined domains.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Radicalism-Conservatism Scale was formally published in 1965 by Andrew L. Comrey and John A. Newmeyer in The Journal of Social Psychology. It was subsequently republished and documented for research dissemination by John P. Robinson and Phillip R. Shaver in 1969 through the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

As a historic psychometric instrument developed under academic research sponsorships and documented in open scholarly archives, the RCS resides in the public domain for academic, educational, and non-commercial scientific research. No licensing fees or proprietary royalties are required for its use in empirical investigations. Scholars utilizing the instrument are expected to maintain academic integrity by citing the original 1965 publication and the 1969 ISR compendium.

References

• Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Harper & Row.
• Comrey, A. L., & Newmeyer, J. A. (1965). Measurement of radicalism-conservatism. The Journal of Social Psychology, 67(2), 357–369. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1965.9922264
• Eysenck, H. J. (1954). The Psychology of Politics. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Ferguson, L. W. (1939). The primary social attitudes. The Journal of Psychology, 8(1), 217–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1939.9917656
• Robinson, J. P., & Shaver, P. R. (1969). Measures of Political Attitudes. Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. https://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/dis/infoserv/isrpub/pdf/Measuresofsocialpsychologicalattitudes_2928_.PDF
• Thurstone, L. L. (1928). Attitudes can be measured. American Journal of Sociology, 33(4), 529–554. https://doi.org/10.1086/214483

Items of the Scale