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STUDYING AUTHORITARIANISM: TOWARD AN ALTERNATIVE METHODOLOGY
Author(s) -
Rhoads James C.,
Sun Tungwen
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
southeastern political review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1747-1346
pISSN - 0730-2177
DOI - 10.1111/j.1747-1346.1994.tb00325.x
Subject(s) - authoritarianism , phenomenon , scale (ratio) , psychology , political science , personality , social psychology , epistemology , law , geography , philosophy , democracy , politics , cartography
Over forty years of research into the authoritarian personality has largely revolved around the measuring instrument, i.e., scales. Taking Altemeyer's Right‐wing Authoritarianism scale (1988) as illustrative of the orthodox approach to studying authoritarianism, we subjected high scorers, in both the United States and Taiwan, to Q factor analysis. This analysis demonstrated a secondary viewpoint, unrelated to a conventional understanding of authoritarianism, that would have been obscured by scale measurement. However, we show this information to be available even to those who use psychometric methods to study the phenomenon.