Authoritarianism: Personality and ideology

Abstract. The concept of authoritarianism has generally been considered a personality construct, although the approach of Adorno et al. was inspired by previous approaches with an ideological 'fascist' angle. These two approaches were, to an appreciable extent, mixed in later conceptualizations. Here, I propose their disentanglement. The classical Adorno et al. F-scale is considered a personality variable. Apart from that, an ideological libertarianism-authoritarianism dimension is constructed, partly validated by its relationship to a shortened unidimensional version of the F-scale. The personality variable of authoritarianism is shown to have no substantial empirical relationship to voting intentions in the Netherlands. However, the ideological measure of authoritarianism is relatively strongly and stably associated with intended voting behaviour. The study also clarifies the ongoing debate over the relationship between authoritarianism and left-right ideology. The weak relationships between measures of authoritarianism and left-right ideology signify the existence of 'left-wing authoritarianism' in the Dutch population.