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Rigidity of the far‐right? Motivated social cognition in a nationally representative sample of Hungarians on the eve of the far‐right breakthrough in the 2010 elections
Author(s) -
Lönnqvist JanErik,
Szabó Zsolt Péter,
Kelemen Laszlo
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
international journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1464-066X
pISSN - 0020-7594
DOI - 10.1002/ijop.12497
Subject(s) - psychology , system justification , certainty , ideology , social psychology , nationalism , cognition , politics , law , political science , epistemology , philosophy , neuroscience
We investigated the “rigidity of the right” hypothesis in the context of the far‐right breakthrough in the 2010 Hungarian parliamentary elections. This hypothesis suggests that psychological characteristics having to do with need for security and certainty attract people to a broad‐based right‐wing ideology. A nationally representative sample ( N = 1000) in terms of age, gender and place of residence was collected by means of the random walking method and face‐to‐face interviews. Voters of JOBBIK ( n = 124), the radically nationalist conservative far‐right party, scored lower on System Justifying Belief, Belief in a Just World (Global) and higher on Need for Cognition than other voters. Our results contradict the “rigidity of the right” hypothesis: JOBBIK voters scored, on many measures, opposite to what the hypothesis would predict.