The Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWA Scale)<\/strong>, developed by Canadian social psychologist Bob Altemeyer<\/a> (1981, 1988, 1996), represents one of the most rigorously validated and influential instruments in political psychology<\/a>, social psychometrics, and personality research. Developed as an empirical and psychometric refinement of the classic California F-Scale (Adorno et al., 1950<\/a>), the RWA Scale conceptualizes authoritarianism not as a psychodynamic neurosis, but as a covariation of three attitudinal clusters: authoritarian submission<\/em> (a high degree of deference to established, legitimate authorities), authoritarian aggression<\/em> (general aggressiveness directed against targeted deviance or outgroups perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities), and conventionalism<\/em> (a rigid adherence to traditional social norms endorsed by society and authority figures). The standard 22-item version (Altemeyer, 1988) employs a balanced design comprising pro-trait (con-trait) and protrait-keyed statements evaluated along an asymmetrical or bipolar 9-point Likert response format ranging from Very Strongly Disagree<\/em> to Very Strongly Agree<\/em>. Decades of empirical administration indicate exceptional psychometric robustness, typically yielding internal consistency estimates (Cronbach’s alpha<\/a>) between .85 and .94, alongside high test-retest reliability across diverse adult and collegiate cohorts. This article provides an exhaustive psychometric exposition of the RWA Scale, detailing its theoretical lineage, latent factor structure, construct and predictive validity, scoring mechanisms, and operational limitations across cross-cultural research settings.<\/p>\n Right-wing Authoritarianism, RWA Scale, Bob Altemeyer, Authoritarian Submission, Authoritarian Aggression, Conventionalism, Political Psychology, Social Dominance Orientation, F-Scale, Psychometrics, Ideological Attitudes, Intergroup Prejudice<\/p>\n The Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and continuously refined by:<\/p>\n Correspondence regarding the original developmental data, validation samples, and longitudinal follow-ups has historically been maintained through the Department of Psychology at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 2N2, Canada.<\/p>\n The primary objective of the Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale is to provide a psychometrically sound, unidimensional or tightly clustered measure of an individual’s psychological willingness to submit to established authorities, adhere dogmatically to traditional social conventions, and endorse aggressive punitive measures against those who deviate from established norms. For decades following the publication of The Authoritarian Personality<\/em> by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford in 1950, psychological research into authoritarianism had reached an empirical impasse. The original instrument, the California F-Scale, was plagued by severe measurement flaws, most notably acquiescence response bias<\/a> (all items were keyed in the affirmative direction), low internal consistency, shifting dimensional factor structures, and an unstable theoretical reliance on psychoanalytic drives that resisted falsification.<\/p>\n Altemeyer designed the RWA Scale to overcome these methodological limitations. His purpose was grounded in an empirical approach: systematically testing hundreds of candidate items across large student and parent cohorts, balancing item directionality to cancel out acquiescence effects, and isolating those behavioral and attitudinal dispositions that empirically covaried. The resulting scale serves several pivotal functions in contemporary research:<\/p>\n The psychological construct of Right-wing Authoritarianism represents an attitudinal constellation defined by the confluence of three distinct, yet empirically correlated, psychological tendencies. Crucially, Altemeyer uses the term “right-wing” not strictly in the narrow sense of contemporary partisan economics (such as free-market capitalism), but in the classical anthropological and psychological sense: a psychological orientation toward preserving the established socio-political order and deferring to the traditions and authorities sanctioned by one’s reference society.<\/p>\n Authoritarian submission is characterized by a profound, uncritical psychological deference toward individuals, institutions, and symbols that are perceived to be the legitimate authorities in one’s society. Individuals high in this dimension perceive established governing bodies, traditional religious hierarchies, and parental figures as inherently moral, knowledgeable, and entitled to absolute compliance. Submissive authoritarians exhibit a high threshold for recognizing governmental malfeasance or moral compromise; when legitimate authorities act in violation of established laws, high-RWA individuals frequently rationalize, dismiss, or actively defend these actions. For example, scale items such as “The established authorities generally turn out to be right about things…”<\/em> directly evaluate this readiness to place cognitive and moral trust in systemic leaders over dissident or reforming voices.<\/p>\n Authoritarian aggression is defined as a general aggressiveness\u2014manifested in hostile attitudes, punitive beliefs, and verbal or physical endorsement of harm\u2014directed against individuals or outgroups perceived to be targets sanctioned by established authority figures. Unlike generalized antisocial aggression, authoritarian aggression is socially mediated and perceived as morally righteous. High-RWA individuals express elevated hostility toward social deviants, political dissidents, sexual minorities, criminals, and anti-establishment protestors because such groups are perceived as threatening the integrity of the social hierarchy. A critical psychological marker of this dimension is the belief that societal survival requires punitive measures, as reflected in items like “What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil, and take us back to our true path.”<\/em> When authorities grant explicit or implicit permission to harm, censor, or persecute a non-conformist group, authoritarian aggression is unleashed without the cognitive dissonance typically associated with interpersonal cruelty.<\/p>\n Conventionalism denotes an unyielding adherence to traditional social norms, customs, and codes of conduct that are perceived to be historically established and endorsed by society’s authority figures. This dimension involves strong resistance to cultural innovation, progressive social movements, moral relativism, and non-normative lifestyles. High conventionalists perceive traditional family structures, orthodox religious dogmas, and historical gender roles not merely as personal preferences, but as absolute, sacred mandates essential for societal stability. Deviation from these norms is viewed with disgust, moral panic, and alarm. Scale items such as “The ‘old-fashioned ways’ and the ‘old-fashioned values’ still show the best way to live”<\/em> and “Women should have to promise to obey their husbands when they get married”<\/em> operationalize this commitment to the cultural status quo and traditionalist social arrangements.<\/p>\n The theoretical framework underlying the RWA Scale represents a departure from the psychodynamic paradigm that dominated mid-twentieth-century authoritarianism research. While Adorno et al. (1950) posited that authoritarianism originated from repressed hostility toward harsh, punitive parents\u2014which was subsequently displaced onto vulnerable scapegoats via psychoanalytic defense mechanisms like projection and reaction formation\u2014Altemeyer formulated RWA primarily through the lens of Social Learning Theory<\/strong> (Bandura, 1977<\/a>) and social-cognitive development.<\/p>\n According to Altemeyer’s social learning perspective, authoritarian traits are not fixed biological characteristics or intrapsychic neuroses. Rather, they represent learned attitudinal configurations acquired through environmental exposure, social reinforcement, and observational modeling during childhood and adolescence. Individuals who exhibit elevated RWA scores typically develop within social environments characterized by high insularity, fundamentalist religious socialization, and uniform peer groups that consistently reinforce obedience, conventionality, and fear of external outgroups. These environments emphasize strict behavioral adherence, present the external world as dangerous and unpredictable, and discourage independent, critical appraisal of authoritative assertions.<\/p>\n To further contextualize the RWA framework within contemporary social psychology, John Duckitt (2001) formulated the Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Model of Ideology and Prejudice<\/em>. In Duckitt’s model, two distinct personality-ideology trajectories lead to social conservatism and intergroup bias: the Social Dominance path and the Authoritarian path.<\/p>\n Within this theoretical model, Authoritarian Submission, Aggression, and Conventionalism act as functional, self-protective strategies. If an individual genuinely perceives the social environment as dangerous, violent, and vulnerable to subversion by malevolent forces, submitting to powerful authorities, enforcing social conformity, and aggressively suppressing deviants are seen as defensive responses designed to preserve collective safety and order.<\/p>\n The validity of the Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale has been scrutinized across hundreds of independent investigations over more than four decades. Its psychometric validation demonstrates substantial construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.<\/p>\n Construct validity is substantiated by consistent, statistically robust correlations with constructs theoretically aligned with ideological dogmatism, social threat, and moral traditionalism. Numerous empirical studies establish that RWA correlates strongly with:<\/p>\n Altemeyer demonstrated that RWA maintains clear discriminant validity from general cognitive intelligence when socio-economic variables are controlled, although modest negative correlations with cognitive flexibility and openness to experience are standard. In terms of the Five-Factor Model of Personality (Big Five)<\/a>, meta-analyses (e.g., Sibley & Duckitt, 2008) indicate that RWA is primarily characterized by a substantial negative correlation with Openness to Experience<\/em> ($r = -.30\\text{ to } -.45$<\/span>) and a modest positive correlation with Conscientiousness<\/em> ($r = .15\\text{ to } .25$<\/span>), while remaining largely distinct from Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.<\/p>\n Furthermore, RWA maintains empirical distinctiveness from Social Dominance Orientation. Although both scales predict generalized prejudice and political conservatism, meta-analytic evidence indicates they correlate only moderately with one another ($r \\approx .20\\text{ to } .35$<\/span>), reflecting divergent underlying motivational orientations\u2014RWA driven by collective threat and fear, SDO driven by power, dominance, and social competition.<\/p>\n The predictive and behavioral validity of the RWA Scale has been validated via complex laboratory simulations, longitudinal tracking, and real-world political voting analyses:<\/p>\n The internal consistency and temporal stability of the Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale are well established. Altemeyer’s iterative test construction model, which utilized continuous item refinement and balanced psychometric designs, led to strong reliability indices across diverse demographic groups.<\/p>\n The 22-item version (1988), alongside its 20-item and 30-item sister variants, exhibits high internal consistency. Across hundreds of independent samples comprising undergraduate students, community adults, and matched parent-child cohorts, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely fall between .85 and .94<\/strong>:<\/p>\n Temporal stability metrics indicate that RWA functions as an enduring socio-ideological orientation. Longitudinal studies spanning multi-year intervals reveal high test-retest correlations:<\/p>\n The latent structural dimensionality of the RWA Scale has sparked debate in psychometrics and political psychology. Altemeyer originally argued that although the scale is theoretically derived from three distinct conceptual components (submission, aggression, conventionalism), these traits covary so closely that the scale behaves empirically as a unidimensional construct<\/strong>. However, contemporary confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) investigations provide alternative structural models.<\/p>\n In early exploratory factor analyses (EFA), Altemeyer reported that a single primary factor accounted for the vast majority of common variance (often between 30% and 45% of total variance), with all items exhibiting moderate-to-high loadings on this general authoritarianism dimension (typically ranging from .40 to .75). Altemeyer posited that the three components form a unified psychological syndrome that naturally clusters together within individuals.<\/p>\n Conversely, subsequent psychometricians (e.g., Funke, 2005<\/a>; Mavor et al., 2010<\/a>) argued that Altemeyer’s single-factor conclusion was influenced by item selection procedures that favored items simultaneously blending multiple dimensions into a single statement (so-called “double-barreled” or multidimensional items, such as Item 7: “The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values [Conventionalism], put some tough leaders in power [Submission], and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas [Aggression]”<\/em>).<\/p>\n When psychometrically evaluated via modern Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), the data frequently support a three-factor model<\/strong> or a bifactor model<\/strong> over a strict unidimensional model:<\/p>\n The 22-item Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale (Altemeyer, 1988) is a self-report psychometric questionnaire designed for paper-and-pencil or digital computer-assisted administration. Below are the structural and procedural specifications of the instrument:<\/p>\n The Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale was developed across multiple iterative stages, with the primary foundational monograph published in 1981<\/strong>, followed by refined editions in 1988<\/strong>, 1996<\/strong>, and 2006<\/strong>. In contrast to many commercially restricted psychological assessment instruments, Bob Altemeyer placed his RWA instruments in the public domain for academic, non-commercial scientific research and educational use. In his 2006 book The Authoritarians<\/em>, Altemeyer explicitly encouraged researchers, educators, and the public to utilize, evaluate, and adapt the scale without paying licensing fees or royalties. Researchers utilizing the instrument in formal academic publications are expected to cite the appropriate validation literature (e.g., Altemeyer, 1981, 1988, 1996) in accordance with standard APA ethical and bibliographic conventions.<\/p>\nKeywords<\/h2>\n
Authors<\/h2>\n
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Purpose<\/h2>\n
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Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
1. Authoritarian Submission<\/h3>\n
2. Authoritarian Aggression<\/h3>\n
3. Conventionalism<\/h3>\n
Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
Social Learning and Cognitive Enculturation<\/h3>\n
The Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Model<\/h3>\n
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Validity<\/h2>\n
Construct and Convergent Validity<\/h3>\n
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Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
Predictive and Ecological Validity<\/h3>\n
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Reliability<\/h2>\n
Internal Consistency<\/h3>\n
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Test-Retest Stability<\/h3>\n
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Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Unidimensionality vs. Three-Factor Structure<\/h3>\n
Confirmatory Factor Analytic Findings<\/h3>\n
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Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
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13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)<\/h2>\n