Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale

1. Abstract

The Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWA Scale), developed by Canadian social psychologist Bob Altemeyer, stands as one of the most rigorously evaluated psychometric instruments in political psychology, social psychology, and the study of intergroup relations. Designed to resolve the severe methodological, conceptual, and psychometric limitations of the classic California F Scale (Adorno et al., 1950), the RWA Scale operationalizes authoritarianism not as an assortment of Freudian defense mechanisms, but as an interrelated constellation of three covariable social attitudinal clusters: authoritarian submission (unquestioning deference to established, legitimate authorities), authoritarian aggression (hostility and punitive sanctioning directed against perceived deviants, sanctioned by established authorities), and conventionalism (strict adherence to traditional social norms endorsed by established authority and society). While refined longitudinally across iterative cohorts, the landmark 1994 version analyzed in this treatise features 34 total statements, of which the first four serve as warm-up items and the remaining 30 items constitute the formally scored assessment.

Administered via a fully balanced 9-point response scale ranging from -4 (very strongly disagree) to +4 (very strongly agree), with 0 representing an explicit neutral midpoint, the instrument neutralizes acquiescence response set bias through an equal distribution of 15 protrait (con-trait direction disagreed, protrait direction agreed) and 15 contrait (reverse-scored) items. Psychometrically, the RWA Scale demonstrates exceptional internal consistency (with Cronbach’s α typically ranging between .88 and .95 across Western university and adult community samples) and robust temporal stability (test-retest reliability exceeding .85 over multi-month intervals). Dimensional analyses support a coherent, highly intercorrelated attitudinal syndrome that exhibits powerful construct validity, predicting generalized prejudice, ethnocentrism, support for civil liberty restrictions, punitive sentencing, religious fundamentalism, and conservative political alignment. This article provides a comprehensive academic review of the scale’s theoretical origins, psychometric properties, factor structure, scoring mechanics, and its verbatim 1994 instrument.

2. Keywords

Right-Wing Authoritarianism, RWA Scale, Bob Altemeyer, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, conventionalism, political psychology, psychometrics, prejudice, religious fundamentalism, social attitudes, California F Scale

3. Authors

The Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and longitudinally refined by Robert (Bob) Altemeyer, Ph.D., an eminent social psychologist and long-time Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Altemeyer received his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in 1965 and dedicated several decades of rigorous empirical research to untangling the psychological foundations of ideological extremism, prejudice, dogmatism, and systemic authoritarian tendencies.

Throughout his tenure, Altemeyer published seminal monographs documenting the empirical evolution of the construct, including Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1981), Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1988), The Authoritarian Specter (1996), and The Authoritarians (2006). Subsequent collaborative research exploring the intersections of RWA, social dominance orientation, and religious orthodoxy involved frequent partnerships with scholars such as Bruce Hunsberger of Wilfrid Laurier University. Academic inquiries regarding Altemeyer’s historical datasets and public-domain instrumentation are archived via the Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, MB, R3T 2N2, Canada).

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale is to provide an empirically grounded, psychometrically sound measurement of an individual’s psychological propensity to submit to established institutional authorities, endorse aggressive punitive actions against societal outgroups or deviants when sanctioned by those authorities, and enforce rigid adherence to conventional moral traditions. Historically, the instrument emerged as a direct response to the psychometric collapse of the California F Scale (Adorno et al., 1950). Although Adorno and colleagues’ theoretical linking of deep-seated personality dynamics to fascist ideological susceptibility was groundbreaking, the original F Scale suffered from fatal methodological flaws: all items were keyed in a single direction (inducing massive acquiescence response bias), items were conceptually vague or multi-barreled, and empirical factor analyses consistently failed to replicate the nine distinct subconstructs posited by psychoanalytic theory.

Altemeyer formulated the RWA Scale to replace speculative psychoanalytic defense mechanisms with an empirically observable, social-cognitive framework. Rather than assessing psychopathology or clinical personality disorders, the RWA Scale measures a generalized ideological attitude orientation that develops through social learning, environmental threat appraisal, and institutional socialization. In basic research, the scale is deployed extensively across political science, sociology, and experimental social psychology to model voting behavior, hostility toward marginalized outgroups (e.g., ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, religious nonconformists), resistance to democratic norms, justification of human rights abuses, and judicial punitiveness.

In applied and intergroup settings, understanding elevated levels of RWA illuminates the socio-cognitive underpinnings of systemic discrimination, political polarization, blind nationalistic loyalty, and compliance with anti-democratic edicts. By assessing the degree to which individuals view the world as an inherently dangerous, chaotic, and sinful jungle that requires severe moral policing and authoritarian governance, researchers utilize the RWA Scale to forecast how citizenries respond to social change, public crises, political propaganda, and legal controversies involving constitutional protections versus state control.

5. Psychological Construct

Right-Wing Authoritarianism represents a tripartite, covariable attitudinal syndrome. Crucially, Altemeyer explicitly emphasizes that RWA is not merely an isolated political stance, nor is it constituted by any single subscale in isolation. The construct represents the simultaneous combination and statistical covariance of three distinct social-attitudinal orientations:

5.1 Authoritarian Submission

Authoritarian submission is defined as a profound, uncritical, and generalized disposition to defer to authorities who are perceived to be established, traditional, and legitimate in the society in which one lives. Individuals high in authoritarian submission hold an almost axiomatic belief that established civil, governmental, and religious leaders possess superior wisdom, moral rectitude, and competence. Consequently, high RWAs argue that citizens must trust leaders without dissent, skepticism, or intrusive oversight. When authorities abuse institutional power or violate statutory regulations, high RWAs frequently justify such misconduct as necessary for preserving social stability. Importantly, the qualifier “right-wing” in Altemeyer’s framework refers primarily to the status of the authority as established and systemic, rather than strictly denoting fiscal conservatism or economic laissez-faire capitalism; the high RWA submits to the prevailing institutional hierarchy.

5.2 Authoritarian Aggression

Authoritarian aggression encompasses a pervasive hostility and readiness to inflict psychological, legal, or physical harm upon various persons or groups, under the crucial psychological condition that such aggression is perceived to be officially sanctioned, endorsed, or encouraged by established societal authorities. Unlike antisocial psychopathy or indiscriminate hostility, the aggressive tendencies of high RWAs are selectively unleashed against targeted scapegoats, social deviants, moral dissidents, radical reformers, and outgroups who are depicted by authorities as threats to the collective order. Because high RWAs perceive themselves as virtuous agents upholding societal law and moral righteousness, they experience minimal guilt or cognitive dissonance when expressing cruelty toward designated social outcasts.

5.3 Conventionalism

Conventionalism refers to an exceptionally high degree of adherence to traditional social norms, customs, and moral standards that are perceived to be sanctioned by society, historic heritage, and established religious traditions. High RWAs perceive social rules—particularly those governing sexual morality, gender roles, modesty, and family structure—as sacred, immutable imperatives rather than evolving historical arrangements. Deviations from conventional lifestyle choices are interpreted not as harmless personal preferences, but as existential threats to the cultural and spiritual survival of the nation. Conversely, low RWAs view social customs as culturally relative, open to critical reinterpretation, and secondary to universal principles of individual autonomy and human rights.

5.4 The Tripartite Synergy

Altemeyer insists that none of these three facets operates as an independent personality silo. For instance, a person who adheres strictly to traditional social decorum (conventionalism) but opposes state censorship and respects anti-war dissidents does not qualify as a right-wing authoritarian. True right-wing authoritarianism exists solely when conventionalism, authoritarian submission, and authoritarian aggression coalesce into a tightly bound cognitive and behavioral orientation that seeks to enforce societal conformity through state-sanctioned coercion.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the RWA Scale draws predominantly from social learning theory, cognitive psychology, and the dual-process model of ideology, diverging sharply from the Freudian psychoanalytic foundations of the Frankfurt School (Adorno et al., 1950). Whereas Adorno and colleagues theorized that authoritarianism arose from harsh, punitive toilet training and unconscious hatred of the father displaced onto vulnerable scapegoats, Altemeyer found negligible empirical support for such psychodynamic claims. Instead, Altemeyer argued that authoritarian attitudes are learned social orientations acquired through childhood observation, peer pressure, secondary socialization, and selective exposure to dogmatic religious and social institutions.

Central to Altemeyer’s theoretical framework is the concept of the dangerous world belief. High RWAs operate under a pervasive cognitive schema that portrays society as teetering on the brink of moral collapse, violent lawlessness, and spiritual ruin. Because they chronically overestimate the prevalence of crime, social depravity, and foreign subversion, their drive for authoritarian submission and aggression emerges as a functional, fear-reducing defense mechanism: strong, merciless leaders and unyielding moral rules are embraced to hold chaos at bay.

In modern social-personality psychology, Altemeyer’s RWA construct forms one-half of the influential Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Model of Ideology and Prejudice formulated by John Duckitt (Duckitt, 2006). In this dual-process paradigm, ideological attitudes are structured by two independent, complementary motivational dimensions:

• Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA): Rooted in a perception of the social world as dangerous, threatening, and unpredictable. It activates motivational goals of collective security, social order, cohesion, and stability, expressing itself through conventional conformity and punitive defense against deviants.
• Social Dominance Orientation (SDO): Conceptualized by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, SDO is rooted in a perception of the world as a competitive jungle characterized by zero-sum resource struggles. It activates motivational goals of power, supremacy, and hierarchy, expressing itself through prejudice against subordinate or disadvantaged groups.

Together, RWA and SDO account for the vast majority of variance in intergroup prejudice, systemic discrimination, and political polarization, establishing the RWA Scale as an indispensable pillar of contemporary sociopolitical psychometrics.

7. Validity

Decades of empirical testing provide extensive evidence demonstrating the construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the RWA Scale across university, community, cross-national, and cross-cultural cohorts.

7.1 Convergent and Construct Validity

The RWA Scale consistently correlates strongly with measures of socio-ideological conformity and religious orthodoxy. Altemeyer (1996) and Altemeyer and Hunsberger (1992) documented that RWA scores correlate between r = .66 and r = .75 with religious fundamentalism across diverse Christian denominations, Palestinian Muslim cohorts, and Orthodox Jewish populations. Furthermore, RWA correlates positively with closed-mindedness, dogmatism, and endorsement of literal-mythic faith stages (Fowler’s Stages 2 and 3; Altemeyer, 1996; Leak & Randall, 1995). Highly authoritarian individuals systematically exhibit lower integrative complexity when evaluating controversial moral, religious, or political issues, relying instead on categorical, black-and-white reasoning (Hunsberger et al., 1994).

7.2 Discriminant Validity

Importantly, the RWA Scale demonstrates clear discriminant validity from general cognitive intelligence, socioeconomic status, and non-authoritarian political conservatism. In structural modeling, RWA diverges cleanly from Social Dominance Orientation; while both constructs predict outgroup prejudice, they correlate only modestly with each other (typically r = .15 to .35) and load onto distinct latent dimensions. Furthermore, Altemeyer’s research demonstrated that RWA does not tap an overarching left-wing authoritarianism (LWA); historically, measures of LWA demonstrated zero relationship with traditional religious variables, whereas RWA consistently correlates with orthodox religiosity and traditional moral conservatism.

7.3 Predictive and Criterion Validity

The predictive utility of the RWA Scale is exceptionally robust across behavioral and experimental paradigms:

• Generalized Prejudice: High RWAs exhibit significantly greater hostility toward ethnic minorities, non-Western immigrants, atheists, feminists, and LGBTQ+ individuals (Hunsberger, 1996).
• Judicial Punitiveness: When participating in simulated jury trials, high RWAs impose systematically harsher prison sentences on criminal defendants, particularly when the defendant is depicted as a social dissident, drug user, or nonconformist. Conversely, if a police officer or governmental official is accused of committing an illegal act against an outgroup, high RWAs exhibit remarkable leniency and acquit the authority figure.
• Civil Liberties Infringement: High RWAs consistently endorse government surveillance, wiretapping, book banning, and the revocation of freedom of assembly for peaceful protesters, declaring that national security and order supersede constitutional guarantees.

8. Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the RWA Scale is among the highest recorded for non-cognitive self-report attitude inventories. Across more than 30 empirical investigations summarized by Altemeyer (1996), the internal consistency reliability of the instrument has systematically hovered around or above α = .90.

8.1 Internal Consistency

In standard university student samples and parent cohorts across North America, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely fall between .88 and .95. For example, testing of the 1994 version yielded typical alphas of .90 to .92 among undergraduate cohorts at the University of Manitoba and regional cross-validation sites. The deliberate inclusion of 15 protrait and 15 contrait scored items ensures that this high internal consistency is not an artifact of acquiescent response style, but reflects genuine shared variance among the core theoretical dimensions. When translated into German, Russian, and Spanish, the scale maintains strong internal consistency (generally α ≥ .85), though lower reliabilities have occasionally been noted in linguistic contexts where translated idioms lost cultural resonance (e.g., α = .43 in an early South African study using an untranslated English version among second-language Xhosa speakers; Altemeyer, 1996).

8.2 Temporal Stability

Test-retest reliability assessments demonstrate that Right-Wing Authoritarianism constitutes a remarkably stable social attitude orientation. Altemeyer reported test-retest correlations of r = .95 over a 1-week interval and r = .85 over a 28-week interval among university undergraduates. Even across extended multi-year developmental transitions—such as the transition from high school through university graduation—RWA scores exhibit impressive rank-order stability, exhibiting modest downward mean shifts as students encounter diverse peer environments, yet preserving individual relative standing (Hunsberger et al., 1996).

9. Factor Analysis

The underlying factor structure of the RWA Scale has been the subject of extensive psychometric debate and rigorous statistical modeling within political psychology.

9.1 Unidimensional vs. Multidimensional Perspectives

Bob Altemeyer originally conceptualized and treated the RWA Scale as psychometrically unidimensional. In exploratory factor analyses (EFA), Altemeyer repeatedly demonstrated that unrotated principal component solutions extract a massive first factor that accounts for a substantial proportion of the common variance, onto which virtually all scored items load substantially (loadings typically exceeding .40 to .65). Based on this empirical evidence, Altemeyer argued that while authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism are conceptually distinguishable, they are so inextricably intertwined in human cognition that they function as a singular, unified attitudinal syndrome, justifying the computation of a single composite score.

9.2 Confirmatory Factor Analysis and the Three-Factor Model

Subsequent psychometricians utilizing sophisticated confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (e.g., Mavor, Louis, & Laythe, 2006; Funke, 2005) have challenged the strictly unidimensional model. These investigations revealed that a hierarchical, three-factor model—distinguishing between latent factors for (1) Authoritarian Submission, (2) Authoritarian Aggression, and (3) Conventionalism—often provides superior statistical fit compared to a one-factor solution:

• CFA Model Fit Indices: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) > .92, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) > .90, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) < .06 for three-factor formulations, compared to poorer fit indices (CFI < .85) for an undifferentiated single-factor model across complex adult samples.
• Inter-Factor Correlations: Latent factor correlations among the three dimensions are exceptionally high (typically r = .60 to .80), validating Altemeyer’s assertion that they operate in close synergy while demonstrating that differential predictive validity can occur (e.g., conventionalism predicting traditional sexual mores, aggression predicting legal punitiveness).
• Method Artifacts: CFA investigations also demonstrate that when item wording direction (protrait vs. contrait) is not modeled, secondary method factors can emerge; however, these represent linguistic phrasing artifacts rather than substantive psychological constructs.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Name: Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale – 1994 Version
• Acronym: RWA (or RWAS)
• Author: Bob Altemeyer, Ph.D.
• Construct Measured: Right-Wing Authoritarianism (comprising Authoritarian Submission, Authoritarian Aggression, and Conventionalism)
• Administration Format: Self-report paper-and-pencil questionnaire or computerized survey
• Completion Time: Approximately 15 to 20 minutes
• Total Number of Items: 34 items total
• Scored Items: 30 items (Items 5 through 34 are scored; Items 1 through 4 are unscored warm-up items)
• Item Keying Breakdown:
  • Protrait Items (Authoritarian response is agreement; scored positively): 15 items (Items 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 18, 21, 23, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34)
  • Contrait Items (Authoritarian response is disagreement; reverse-scored): 15 items (Items 6, 8, 10, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 33)
• Response Format: 9-point Likert-type scale ranging from -4 to +4 with an explicit neutral midpoint:
  • -4 = Very strongly disagree
  • -3 = Strongly disagree
  • -2 = Moderately disagree
  • -1 = Slightly disagree
  • 0 = Exactly and precisely neutral
  • +1 = Slightly agree
  • +2 = Moderately agree
  • +3 = Strongly agree
  • +4 = Very strongly agree
• Scoring Procedure:
  1. Discard Items 1, 2, 3, and 4 (unscored practice items).
  2. Recode the raw responses (-4 to +4) onto a 1-to-9 metric by adding a constant of 5: (-4 becomes 1, -3 becomes 2, -2 becomes 3, -1 becomes 4, 0 becomes 5, +1 becomes 6, +2 becomes 7, +3 becomes 8, and +4 becomes 9).
  3. For Protrait Items, retain this recoded value (1 to 9).
  4. For Contrait Items (indicated by an asterisk *), reverse-score the recoded value: Reverse Score = 10 – Recoded Value (i.e., a raw -4 becomes 9, raw -3 becomes 8, raw 0 remains 5, raw +4 becomes 1).
  5. Sum the transformed scores for all 30 scored items (Items 5 through 34).
• Score Range & Norms:
  • Theoretical Score Range: 30 to 270 points.
  • Theoretical Midpoint: 150 points.
  • Normative Reference Means: North American university undergraduate cohorts typically score in the 120s (e.g., M ≈ 120-128, SD ≈ 30-35). Adult parent cohorts typically score approximately 25 points higher (M ≈ 145-155). Samples from religious non-Christian groups in Canada yielded historical means of: Hindus (M = 157.2, SD = 22.0), Muslims (M = 171.5, SD = 28.7), and Jews (M = 110.8, SD = 41.0; Hunsberger, 1996).
  • Gender Differences: Minimal or non-significant differences in overall RWA scores; men tend to score slightly higher on authoritarian aggression items, whereas women tend to score slightly higher on conventionalism items.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale was formally developed in its modern iterations across the 1980s and 1990s, with the specific version analyzed here published in 1994 (and formally documented in Altemeyer’s 1996 volume, The Authoritarian Specter, Harvard University Press). In an exemplary commitment to open scientific inquiry, Dr. Bob Altemeyer placed the RWA Scale in the public domain for academic, scientific, and educational research purposes.

No licensing fees, formal permissions, or royalty payments are required for academic researchers, graduate students, or non-commercial research institutions to reproduce, administer, or translate the scale. Dr. Altemeyer explicitly encouraged scholars worldwide to utilize the instrument freely in non-profit empirical investigations, requesting only proper scientific citation of his published monographs and papers in resulting publications. Any commercial deployment, proprietary software packaging, or monetization of the instrument requires direct negotiation and explicit written approval from the copyright holder or author estate.

12. References

Below are primary academic works, psychometric investigations, and theoretical monographs relevant to the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale:

• Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. Harper & Brothers.
• Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. University of Manitoba Press.
• Altemeyer, B. (1988). Enemies of freedom: Understanding right-wing authoritarianism. Jossey-Bass.
• Altemeyer, B. (1996). The authoritarian specter. Harvard University Press.
• Altemeyer, B. (2006). The authoritarians. University of Manitoba. https://theauthoritarians.org/
• Altemeyer, B., & Hunsberger, B. (1992). Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, quest, and prejudice. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2(2), 113–133. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327582ijpr0202_5
• Duckitt, J. (2006). Differential evolutionary social psychological foundations of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. Political Psychology, 27(5), 685–716. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2006.00522.x
• Funke, F. (2005). The dimensionality of right-wing authoritarianism: Lessons from the dilemma between theory and measurement. Political Psychology, 26(2), 195–218. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2005.00415.x
• Hunsberger, B. (1996). Religious fundamentalism, right-wing authoritarianism, and hostility toward homosexuals in non-Christian religious groups. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 6(1), 39–49. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327582ijpr0601_5
• Hunsberger, B., Pancer, S. M., Pratt, M. W., & Alisat, S. (1996). The transition to university: Is religion related to adjustment? In M. L. Lynn & D. O. Moberg (Eds.), Research in the social scientific study of religion (Vol. 7, pp. 181–199). JAI Press.
• Hunsberger, B., Pratt, M., & Pancer, S. M. (1994). Religious fundamentalism and integrative complexity of thought: A relationship for existential content only? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 33(4), 335–346. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386493
• Leak, G. K., & Randall, B. A. (1995). Clarification of the link between right-wing authoritarianism and religiousness: The role of religious maturity. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 34(2), 245–252. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386769
• Mavor, K. I., Louis, W. R., & Laythe, B. (2006). Right-wing authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and prejudice: New aspects of old issues. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 45(4), 543–560. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2006.00327.x

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)