Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale

Abstract

The Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWA Scale), developed by Canadian social psychologist Bob Altemeyer (1981, 1988, 1996), represents one of the most rigorously validated and influential instruments in political psychology, social psychometrics, and personality research. Developed as an empirical and psychometric refinement of the classic California F-Scale (Adorno et al., 1950), the RWA Scale conceptualizes authoritarianism not as a psychodynamic neurosis, but as a covariation of three attitudinal clusters: authoritarian submission (a high degree of deference to established, legitimate authorities), authoritarian aggression (general aggressiveness directed against targeted deviance or outgroups perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities), and conventionalism (a rigid adherence to traditional social norms endorsed by society and authority figures). The standard 22-item version (Altemeyer, 1988) employs a balanced design comprising pro-trait (con-trait) and protrait-keyed statements evaluated along an asymmetrical or bipolar 9-point Likert response format ranging from Very Strongly Disagree to Very Strongly Agree. Decades of empirical administration indicate exceptional psychometric robustness, typically yielding internal consistency estimates (Cronbach’s alpha) between .85 and .94, alongside high test-retest reliability across diverse adult and collegiate cohorts. This article provides an exhaustive psychometric exposition of the RWA Scale, detailing its theoretical lineage, latent factor structure, construct and predictive validity, scoring mechanisms, and operational limitations across cross-cultural research settings.

Keywords

Right-wing Authoritarianism, RWA Scale, Bob Altemeyer, Authoritarian Submission, Authoritarian Aggression, Conventionalism, Political Psychology, Social Dominance Orientation, F-Scale, Psychometrics, Ideological Attitudes, Intergroup Prejudice

Authors

The Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and continuously refined by:

• Robert A. (Bob) Altemeyer, Ph.D.: Associate Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Altemeyer devoted over four decades of empirical investigation to the measurement and structural modeling of authoritarian personality dispositions, authoring seminal monographs including Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1981), Enemies of Freedom (1988), The Authoritarian Spectre (1996), and The Authoritarians (2006).

Correspondence regarding the original developmental data, validation samples, and longitudinal follow-ups has historically been maintained through the Department of Psychology at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 2N2, Canada.

Purpose

The primary objective of the Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale is to provide a psychometrically sound, unidimensional or tightly clustered measure of an individual’s psychological willingness to submit to established authorities, adhere dogmatically to traditional social conventions, and endorse aggressive punitive measures against those who deviate from established norms. For decades following the publication of The Authoritarian Personality by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford in 1950, psychological research into authoritarianism had reached an empirical impasse. The original instrument, the California F-Scale, was plagued by severe measurement flaws, most notably acquiescence response bias (all items were keyed in the affirmative direction), low internal consistency, shifting dimensional factor structures, and an unstable theoretical reliance on psychoanalytic drives that resisted falsification.

Altemeyer designed the RWA Scale to overcome these methodological limitations. His purpose was grounded in an empirical approach: systematically testing hundreds of candidate items across large student and parent cohorts, balancing item directionality to cancel out acquiescence effects, and isolating those behavioral and attitudinal dispositions that empirically covaried. The resulting scale serves several pivotal functions in contemporary research:

• Predicting Intergroup Hostility and Ethnocentrism: The RWA Scale demonstrates predictive power across a spectrum of social prejudices, including homophobia, xenophobia, racial and ethnic bias, and hostility toward religious minorities.
• Understanding Political Cognition and Behavior: It functions as a standard predictor of conservative party affiliation, voting behavior, endorsement of aggressive foreign policies, and public acceptance of civil liberty infringements in the name of national security or crime control.
• Investigating Legal and Punitive Decision-Making: The scale is extensively utilized in forensic and legal psychology to evaluate juror punitiveness, support for capital punishment, deference to law enforcement testimony, and harshness in judicial sentencing.
• Theoretical Modeling of Ideology: In conjunction with measures like Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), the RWA Scale forms the foundational empirical basis for modern dual-process cognitive-motivational models of political ideology and prejudice (Duckitt, 2001).

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct of Right-wing Authoritarianism represents an attitudinal constellation defined by the confluence of three distinct, yet empirically correlated, psychological tendencies. Crucially, Altemeyer uses the term “right-wing” not strictly in the narrow sense of contemporary partisan economics (such as free-market capitalism), but in the classical anthropological and psychological sense: a psychological orientation toward preserving the established socio-political order and deferring to the traditions and authorities sanctioned by one’s reference society.

1. Authoritarian Submission

Authoritarian submission is characterized by a profound, uncritical psychological deference toward individuals, institutions, and symbols that are perceived to be the legitimate authorities in one’s society. Individuals high in this dimension perceive established governing bodies, traditional religious hierarchies, and parental figures as inherently moral, knowledgeable, and entitled to absolute compliance. Submissive authoritarians exhibit a high threshold for recognizing governmental malfeasance or moral compromise; when legitimate authorities act in violation of established laws, high-RWA individuals frequently rationalize, dismiss, or actively defend these actions. For example, scale items such as “The established authorities generally turn out to be right about things…” directly evaluate this readiness to place cognitive and moral trust in systemic leaders over dissident or reforming voices.

2. Authoritarian Aggression

Authoritarian aggression is defined as a general aggressiveness—manifested in hostile attitudes, punitive beliefs, and verbal or physical endorsement of harm—directed against individuals or outgroups perceived to be targets sanctioned by established authority figures. Unlike generalized antisocial aggression, authoritarian aggression is socially mediated and perceived as morally righteous. High-RWA individuals express elevated hostility toward social deviants, political dissidents, sexual minorities, criminals, and anti-establishment protestors because such groups are perceived as threatening the integrity of the social hierarchy. A critical psychological marker of this dimension is the belief that societal survival requires punitive measures, as reflected in items like “What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil, and take us back to our true path.” When authorities grant explicit or implicit permission to harm, censor, or persecute a non-conformist group, authoritarian aggression is unleashed without the cognitive dissonance typically associated with interpersonal cruelty.

3. Conventionalism

Conventionalism denotes an unyielding adherence to traditional social norms, customs, and codes of conduct that are perceived to be historically established and endorsed by society’s authority figures. This dimension involves strong resistance to cultural innovation, progressive social movements, moral relativism, and non-normative lifestyles. High conventionalists perceive traditional family structures, orthodox religious dogmas, and historical gender roles not merely as personal preferences, but as absolute, sacred mandates essential for societal stability. Deviation from these norms is viewed with disgust, moral panic, and alarm. Scale items such as “The ‘old-fashioned ways’ and the ‘old-fashioned values’ still show the best way to live” and “Women should have to promise to obey their husbands when they get married” operationalize this commitment to the cultural status quo and traditionalist social arrangements.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework underlying the RWA Scale represents a departure from the psychodynamic paradigm that dominated mid-twentieth-century authoritarianism research. While Adorno et al. (1950) posited that authoritarianism originated from repressed hostility toward harsh, punitive parents—which was subsequently displaced onto vulnerable scapegoats via psychoanalytic defense mechanisms like projection and reaction formation—Altemeyer formulated RWA primarily through the lens of Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977) and social-cognitive development.

Social Learning and Cognitive Enculturation

According to Altemeyer’s social learning perspective, authoritarian traits are not fixed biological characteristics or intrapsychic neuroses. Rather, they represent learned attitudinal configurations acquired through environmental exposure, social reinforcement, and observational modeling during childhood and adolescence. Individuals who exhibit elevated RWA scores typically develop within social environments characterized by high insularity, fundamentalist religious socialization, and uniform peer groups that consistently reinforce obedience, conventionality, and fear of external outgroups. These environments emphasize strict behavioral adherence, present the external world as dangerous and unpredictable, and discourage independent, critical appraisal of authoritative assertions.

The Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Model

To further contextualize the RWA framework within contemporary social psychology, John Duckitt (2001) formulated the Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Model of Ideology and Prejudice. In Duckitt’s model, two distinct personality-ideology trajectories lead to social conservatism and intergroup bias: the Social Dominance path and the Authoritarian path.

• The SDO Trajectory: Originating from a tough-minded personality disposition, low empathy, and a competitive worldview where life is seen as a “ruthless jungle,” leading to Social Dominance Orientation (a drive for group-based hierarchy and dominance).
• The RWA Trajectory: Originating from high trait orderliness, low openness to experience, and high dispositional neuroticism/fearfulness. This disposition, reinforced by social learning, leads to a generalized “Dangerous World View”—the belief that society is inherently unstable, perilous, and constantly on the brink of moral collapse or chaotic destruction.

Within this theoretical model, Authoritarian Submission, Aggression, and Conventionalism act as functional, self-protective strategies. If an individual genuinely perceives the social environment as dangerous, violent, and vulnerable to subversion by malevolent forces, submitting to powerful authorities, enforcing social conformity, and aggressively suppressing deviants are seen as defensive responses designed to preserve collective safety and order.

Validity

The validity of the Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale has been scrutinized across hundreds of independent investigations over more than four decades. Its psychometric validation demonstrates substantial construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by consistent, statistically robust correlations with constructs theoretically aligned with ideological dogmatism, social threat, and moral traditionalism. Numerous empirical studies establish that RWA correlates strongly with:

• Religious Fundamentalism: Consistently yielding strong positive correlations ($r = .55\text{ to } .72$), as documented by Altemeyer and Hunsberger (1992, 2004), demonstrating that individuals high in RWA tend to adopt literal, uncritical adherence to traditional religious dogmas.
• Ethnocentrism and Generalized Prejudice: Significant moderate-to-strong correlations ($r = .40\text{ to } .65$) with anti-immigrant sentiment, systemic racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism across North American, European, and Australian samples (Duckitt et al., 2002).
• Homophobia and Heterosexism: The RWA Scale is one of the strongest psychometric predictors of anti-gay prejudice ($r = .50\text{ to } .75$), driven by the violation of traditional gender norms and conventional sexual ethics central to authoritarian conventionalism.
• Legal Punitiveness: High RWA scores systematically predict juror tendencies to convict defendants accused of anti-social, non-conformist, or counter-cultural offenses, along with support for capital punishment, mandatory minimum sentences, and acceptance of police use of force (Narby et al., 1993).

Discriminant Validity

Altemeyer demonstrated that RWA maintains clear discriminant validity from general cognitive intelligence when socio-economic variables are controlled, although modest negative correlations with cognitive flexibility and openness to experience are standard. In terms of the Five-Factor Model of Personality (Big Five), meta-analyses (e.g., Sibley & Duckitt, 2008) indicate that RWA is primarily characterized by a substantial negative correlation with Openness to Experience ($r = -.30\text{ to } -.45$) and a modest positive correlation with Conscientiousness ($r = .15\text{ to } .25$), while remaining largely distinct from Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Furthermore, RWA maintains empirical distinctiveness from Social Dominance Orientation. Although both scales predict generalized prejudice and political conservatism, meta-analytic evidence indicates they correlate only moderately with one another ($r \approx .20\text{ to } .35$), reflecting divergent underlying motivational orientations—RWA driven by collective threat and fear, SDO driven by power, dominance, and social competition.

Predictive and Ecological Validity

The predictive and behavioral validity of the RWA Scale has been validated via complex laboratory simulations, longitudinal tracking, and real-world political voting analyses:

• The Global Change Game Simulation: In an experimental simulation conducted by Altemeyer (2003), groups composed entirely of high-RWA participants, low-RWA participants, or moderate-RWA participants were tasked with managing the planetary economy, resources, and geopolitical stability over multiple simulated decades. High-RWA groups led the simulation into complete nuclear conflict, militarization, ecological collapse, and economic bankruptcy, driven by deep mutual suspicion, aggressive posturing, and submissive reliance on militaristic executive decisions. In contrast, low-RWA cohorts consistently negotiated cooperative international accords and avoided planetary collapse.
• Real-World Political Sorting: Across decades of electoral research in North America and Western Europe, RWA scores predict support for right-wing populist leaders, acceptance of surveillance laws, opposition to environmental regulations, and endorsement of executive power during socio-political crises.

Reliability

The internal consistency and temporal stability of the Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale are well established. Altemeyer’s iterative test construction model, which utilized continuous item refinement and balanced psychometric designs, led to strong reliability indices across diverse demographic groups.

Internal Consistency

The 22-item version (1988), alongside its 20-item and 30-item sister variants, exhibits high internal consistency. Across hundreds of independent samples comprising undergraduate students, community adults, and matched parent-child cohorts, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely fall between .85 and .94:

• Altemeyer’s foundational Canadian normative samples (1981, 1988, 1996) demonstrated alpha values centering around $\alpha = .88\text{ to } .91$.
• Cross-national adaptations across the United States, South Africa, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Australia have mirrored these findings, rarely reporting alpha coefficients below .82, even when translated across diverse linguistic frameworks.
• Mean inter-item correlations typically fall within the optimal range of .25 to .40, indicating construct breadth without excessive item redundancy.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability metrics indicate that RWA functions as an enduring socio-ideological orientation. Longitudinal studies spanning multi-year intervals reveal high test-retest correlations:

• Over intervals of several months, test-retest reliability ranges from $r = .85\text{ to } .92$.
• Longitudinal evaluations tracking students from their first year of university through graduation (a four-year developmental interval) have demonstrated stability coefficients between $r = .65\text{ and } .75$ (Altemeyer, 1988, 1996), revealing that while higher education typically exerts a modest liberalizing downward shift in overall RWA scores, individuals’ relative rank-order stability remains largely preserved.

Factor Analysis

The latent structural dimensionality of the RWA Scale has sparked debate in psychometrics and political psychology. Altemeyer originally argued that although the scale is theoretically derived from three distinct conceptual components (submission, aggression, conventionalism), these traits covary so closely that the scale behaves empirically as a unidimensional construct. However, contemporary confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) investigations provide alternative structural models.

Unidimensionality vs. Three-Factor Structure

In early exploratory factor analyses (EFA), Altemeyer reported that a single primary factor accounted for the vast majority of common variance (often between 30% and 45% of total variance), with all items exhibiting moderate-to-high loadings on this general authoritarianism dimension (typically ranging from .40 to .75). Altemeyer posited that the three components form a unified psychological syndrome that naturally clusters together within individuals.

Conversely, subsequent psychometricians (e.g., Funke, 2005; Mavor et al., 2010) argued that Altemeyer’s single-factor conclusion was influenced by item selection procedures that favored items simultaneously blending multiple dimensions into a single statement (so-called “double-barreled” or multidimensional items, such as Item 7: “The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values [Conventionalism], put some tough leaders in power [Submission], and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas [Aggression]”).

Confirmatory Factor Analytic Findings

When psychometrically evaluated via modern Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), the data frequently support a three-factor model or a bifactor model over a strict unidimensional model:

• Three Correlated Factors Model: Separating the items into distinct dimensions of Authoritarian Submission, Authoritarian Aggression, and Conventionalism significantly improves global fit indices: Root Mean Square Error of Approximation ($\text{RMSEA} < .06$), Comparative Fit Index ($\text{CFI} > .92$), and Tucker-Lewis Index ($\text{TLI} > .90$). Factor intercorrelations among the three latent dimensions are typically strong, ranging from $r = .60\text{ to } .80$.
• Bifactor Model: A bifactor representation—specifying a broad, general RWA factor accounting for common variance across all items, alongside three orthogonal group factors corresponding to submission, aggression, and conventionalism—often provides the most robust empirical fit. This indicates that while a general authoritarian disposition exists, distinct subscale variance remains substantively meaningful for predicting specialized behavioral criteria.
• Methodological Artifacts (Keying Factors): CFA models that fail to control for item wording often reveal a spurious two-factor solution driven entirely by the direction of item keying (pro-trait vs. con-trait/reverse-worded items). When methodological factors are accounted for via correlated error terms or a method-specific latent factor, the theoretical substantive factors emerge cleanly.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The 22-item Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale (Altemeyer, 1988) is a self-report psychometric questionnaire designed for paper-and-pencil or digital computer-assisted administration. Below are the structural and procedural specifications of the instrument:

• Construct Assessed: Right-wing Authoritarianism (Authoritarian Submission, Authoritarian Aggression, Conventionalism).
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (typically aged 16 and older); widely deployed in university student, community adult, and cross-national populations.
• Total Item Count: 22 items.
• Balanced Keying Structure:
  • Pro-trait Items (Keyed in the Authoritarian direction): 12 items (Items 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 19, 22).
  • Con-trait Items (Keyed in the Non-Authoritarian / Reverse direction): 10 items (Items 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20, 21).
• Response Scale: 9-point Likert-type scale reflecting degrees of agreement/disagreement:
  • Very Strongly Disagree
  • Strongly Disagree
  • Moderately Disagree
  • Slightly Disagree
  • Feel Neutral
  • Slightly Agree
  • Moderately Agree
  • Strongly Agree
  • Very Strongly Agree
• Scoring Mechanism:
  • Responses are typically coded from 1 to 9 (or alternatively from -4 to +4, then linearly transformed to a positive 1 to 9 metric).
  • Standard Scoring (Pro-trait items):
    • Very Strongly Disagree = 1
    • Strongly Disagree = 2
    • Moderately Disagree = 3
    • Slightly Disagree = 4
    • Feel Neutral = 5
    • Slightly Agree = 6
    • Moderately Agree = 7
    • Strongly Agree = 8
    • Very Strongly Agree = 9
  • Reverse Scoring (Con-trait items: 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20, 21):
    • Very Strongly Disagree = 9
    • Strongly Disagree = 8
    • Moderately Disagree = 7
    • Slightly Disagree = 6
    • Feel Neutral = 5
    • Slightly Agree = 4
    • Moderately Agree = 3
    • Strongly Agree = 2
    • Very Strongly Agree = 1
  • Total Score Calculation: The sum of all 22 recoded items yields a continuous global score ranging from 22 to 198. Higher cumulative scores indicate greater levels of Right-wing Authoritarianism. Alternatively, an average item score (total score divided by 22) ranging from 1.0 to 9.0 may be reported.
• Administration Time: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale was developed across multiple iterative stages, with the primary foundational monograph published in 1981, followed by refined editions in 1988, 1996, and 2006. In contrast to many commercially restricted psychological assessment instruments, Bob Altemeyer placed his RWA instruments in the public domain for academic, non-commercial scientific research and educational use. In his 2006 book The Authoritarians, Altemeyer explicitly encouraged researchers, educators, and the public to utilize, evaluate, and adapt the scale without paying licensing fees or royalties. Researchers utilizing the instrument in formal academic publications are expected to cite the appropriate validation literature (e.g., Altemeyer, 1981, 1988, 1996) in accordance with standard APA ethical and bibliographic conventions.

References

• Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Harper & Row.
• Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right-Wing Authoritarianism. University of Manitoba Press. https://uofmfoundation.blob.core.windows.net/umfm/9780887553073.pdf
• Altemeyer, B. (1988). Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Jossey-Bass.
• Altemeyer, B. (1996). The Authoritarian Spectre. Harvard University Press.
• Altemeyer, B. (1998). The other “authoritarian personality”. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 30, pp. 47–92). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60382-2
• Altemeyer, B. (2003). What happens when authoritarians inherit the earth? A simulation. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 3(1), 161–169. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1530-2415.2003.00022.x
• Altemeyer, B. (2006). The Authoritarians. University of Manitoba. https://theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book/
• Altemeyer, B., & Hunsberger, B. (1992). Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, quest, and prejudice. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2(2), 113–133. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327582ijpr0202_5
• Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Prentice-Hall.
• Duckitt, J. (2001). A cognitive-motivational theory of ideological attitudes: Authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 33, pp. 41–107). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(01)80005-4
• Duckitt, J., Wagner, C., du Plessis, I., & Birum, I. (2002). The psychological bases of ideological beliefs: A group-mediated social representation approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(1), 75–93. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.1.75
• Funke, F. (2005). The dimensionality of right-wing authoritarianism: Lessons from the dilemma between theoretical complex concepts and simple models. Political Psychology, 26(2), 195–218. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2005.00418.x
• Mavor, K. I., Louis, W. R., & Sibley, C. G. (2010). A bias-corrected exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of right-wing authoritarianism: Support for a three-factor structure. Political Psychology, 31(4), 565–597. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2009.00731.x
• Narby, D. J., Cutler, B. L., & Moran, G. (1993). A meta-analysis of the association between authoritarianism and jurors’ perceptions of defendant culpability. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78(1), 34–42. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.78.1.34
• Sibley, C. G., & Duckitt, J. (2008). Personality and prejudice: A meta-analysis and theoretical review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12(3), 248–279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868308319226

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)