On the ideological consistency between right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation

The authors argue that cross-national variation in the association between right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) depends upon the degree to which political systems are organized along a single explicitly ideologically articulated left–right dimension. In societies where the political system is ideologized along a single dimension, RWA and SDO should be strongly positively correlated, and the magnitude of this association should be moderated by political identification. This hypothesis was tested in Italy, a society where the political system is highly ideologized, using analyses of concurrent data from student (N = 148) and community samples (N = 133) (study 1), and an experiment in which the salience of peoples’ political identification was manipulated (study 2; N = 151). In both studies, stronger political identification was associated with a significantly stronger positive RWA–SDO association, although mean levels of RWA and SDO did not vary across conditions in study 2.