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Christopher M. Federico et al., "The Authoritarian Divide: Partisan Identity, Voting, and the Transformation of the American Electorate" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
Christopher Federico
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
Lily Gorn
Hello. This is Lily Gorn with the New Books Network. Today I'm joined by Christopher Federico and Christopher Weber and absent their third author, Stanley Feldman, to talk about the authoritarian divide, partisan identity, voting and the transformation of the American electorate. This was published by Oxford University Press in 2026, and it's part of their series in political psychology. But I'm going to ask Chris and Chris to tell us all about that. I'd like to welcome Chris Federico and Chris Weber to the new Books in Political Science podcasts and to ask them both to tell us a little bit about how they came to this particular project. Hello, Chris's hi there.
- [00:50]
Christopher Weber
Hi, Lily.
- [00:52]
Lily Gorn
So one of you has to talk a little bit about how you came to this project.
- [00:57]
Christopher Federico
Well, I'll do my piece first. This is Chris Federico. So we had been thinking about this project in some form or another since the Midwest Political Science association meeting in 2017. This was right after Donald Trump had taken over as president for the time first. First time. And naturally, the broader question of authoritarianism, in the political sense of that word, as opposed to the psychological sense, was on our mind. And, you know, being three political psychologists who are very much interested in sort of the micro foundations of why people are attracted to this or that belief system, this or that party identification or this or that candidate, we naturally thought that the psychological construction of authoritarianism so sort of a predisposition to desire, conformity, uniformity, and sort of group cohesion. We figured that that was probably something that not only might explain why Donald Trump was receiving support, but also why people over the long term were increasingly sorting into different polls, political camps. So this is something that we talked about a lot in Potter's Bar in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago during that meeting. And eventually this turned into an effort over the next few weeks to create a post for what was then the monkey cage. Now it's good authority. And so we published a post on this showing that indeed authoritarianism was predicting increasing sorting into the Republican Party if you're high in authoritarianism, and the Democratic Party if you were low in authoritarianism. And this was kind of picking up over time and at that point sort of hitting a maximal point as we went into the 2000, we had gone into the 2016 election, you know, excuse me. And over the next few months, it just kind of turned into a more expansive and ambitious project. And by the end of that year, we were working on a book project. Chris, is that your recollection? Am I missing anything?
- [03:34]
Christopher Weber
That was great. So, yeah, I have a similar take on things. Three political scientists sitting in Potter's bar trying to understand what the, what, what the political world or why the political world was what it was in 2017. We, we all had been kind of working on authoritarianism in separate projects, but also together. I've been working with, with Chris and Stanley through much of my career, really trying to understand the, the fundamental nature of authoritarianism, this kind of conflict between conformity and autonomy independently. And again, kind of together we had, we, we had several papers looking at authoritarianism, the, the morality kind of underlying authoritarian beliefs, how psychological processes sort of lead into authoritarianism. And, you know, at the time there, there was certainly a resurgence in authoritarianism research. It became pretty popular, if you remember, back to the 2016 election, trying to understand the outcome. And so, yeah, we have been working on it for some time. The thing with working in American political behavior and public opinion is that the target's always moving. So it's like we'd finish a draft of a chapter and then all of a sudden, like, the predictions we were making tended to be true, sometimes they weren't, and, you know, you'd have to rewrite it. So, yeah, that's really kind of where we started and we've been working on it since.
- [05:27]
Lily Gorn
And this is a really, really interesting book because it helps make sense of, in lots of ways what we see going on in American politics, also global politics, in, in a certain sense. But it certainly helped me to think about, you know, the sort of sorting of the parties and issue salience and so forth. But I wanted to start out by asking the two of you to define some terms because most people haven't read the book yet. And so you talk about political authoritarianism and psychological authoritarianism as sort of two different things, but obviously connected. Can you sort of define those out so that everybody kind of has a sense of what we're talking about?
- [06:16]
Christopher Weber
Sure, I can do that. Chris Weber. So one of the issues in working in this space, sort of trying to understand again, how people are, the consequences of this kind of division between conformity attitudes and autonomy attitudes is we use this term authoritarianism, which has all sorts of other meanings within everyday speech, but also or everyday rhetoric as well as political science. And so our focus really is not here on authoritarianism as a political system or a political regime. That's, I think, fair to say that the way that the term is typically used is in reference to that. So, you know, if you're picking up the book, thinking we're going to compare the American electoral or political system to others. That's. That's really not quite it. Our focus is on authoritarianism as a. As a psychological construct. It's been used in the, in this way for an awful long time, since at least, you know, like the 1930s or so. And here the focus is less on a political regime or a political system, but rather on one's individual tendency to submit to authority, endorse kind of conformity, related preferences, and then explore kind of the consequences of this psychological attribute or disposition when it comes to politics, whether that's voting, you know, partisanship, that sort of thing.
- [08:02]
Christopher Federico
Yeah. So though there are those two separate ways of thinking about it, either as a general psychological predisposition that precedes politics in a sense, or as specific explicit support for autocratic forms of government, illiberal forms of government, and so on and so forth. The one thing I would add to what Chris Weber said is that the study of authoritarianism in these two senses is old and very intertwined in a sense. So as a psychological construct, interest in authoritarianism very much has its origins in the interwar period in making sense of why people, some people are attracted to illiberal political movements. And one very important thing to emphasize about the genesis of authoritarianism as a psychological construct is a lot of the original ideas do not even come out of psychology per se. They come out of social theory, and in particular, some of the ideas of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. During the interwar period in Germany at this time, of course, Germany was very much in turmoil. Europe was very much in turmoil. And the Frankfurt School, of course, had Marxist origins. They were Marxist social theorists, they were somewhat heterodox Marxists. And one thing they were very interested in figuring out is why if capitalism was entering a state of crisis, people were turning to sort of reactionary and nationalistic movements as opposed to. Opposed to ones that are more revolutionary or forward looking. And one thing they kind of seized on is the psychological syndrome of authoritarianism, which they originally conceptualized in psychodynamic or Freudian terms. The idea eventually found its way into individual differences psychology immediately after World War II, through the publication of the book the Authoritarian Personality. It kind of lost some of its original, you know, Freudian slash Marxist origins. But some of the same basic ideas were there that are some individuals more than others who are predisposed to seek obedience or to obey authority within groups and to kind of conform to in group norms in a stronger way than others, and above all to kind of enforce obedience and conformity and that idea has persisted through multiple evolutions and developments, basically within psychology, of course, but also most recently and most proximately for us within the study of political behavior.
- [10:54]
Lily Gorn
And this was one of the things that I found really, really enlightening in terms of the way that you unpacked the history coming out of the Frankfurt School and the sort of Marxist perspective and the Freudian perspective and sort of moving that forward to also understand not only sort of the psychological dynamics, but why this moves people towards sort of authoritarianism. And so I wanted to ask you in a follow up question, cause you've sort of made reference to some of these characteristics of those who are inclined towards authoritarianism in terms of the psychology of it and those who might not be inclined the essentially the belief system. You've talked about conformity, you've talked about obedience, and there are other components to this. Can you both sort of define out a little bit of what we're talking about here?
- [11:58]
Christopher Weber
I mean, I can try. So you mean like, what are the kind of like foundations, like the psychological characteristics of. Sure. So this has been really one of kind of the changing features of authoritarianism over time. So the original authoritarian personality published in 1950, again, this stuff that grows or this research that grows out of interwar Germany and the Frankfurt School, the, the understanding in early authoritarianism research was that authoritarianism is kind of like this constellation of different things. It's ethnocentrism, it's anti Semitism, it's fascism, and oh, political and economic conservatism. These things are kind of like bundled together and form this authoritarian syndrome. Again in the original genesis of the term. In practice, what this is often led to is measuring authoritarianism in this tradition using something called the fascism scale or the F scale. You still see that quite a lot in psychology work less so outside of psychology. And what the F scale sort of consists of is nine different dimensions or characteristics that constitute these underlying fascistic tendencies. Over time and in fact, quite quickly after the authoritarian personalities published, a number of scholars roundly critique the work. Really well known scholars, especially in the United States, critique the work on a number of both substantive and methodological grounds. Much of the critique, the ensuing critique over the coming years focused on the measurement of authoritarianism. This idea that is it conservatism? Is conservatism bound up in it or is it something else? And so there have been sort of multiple facelifts, for lack of a better term, over time in how authoritarianism is understood. Even he didn't really see quite as Much authoritarianism work, at least called authoritarianism work in the 1970s, but still a focus on related constructs and related things. So dogmatism, for instance. But it's really not until the work of Bob Altemeyer, a Canadian psychologist starting in the 1980s and his work on authoritarianism, which we sort of see this resurgence in authoritarianism research. And what Altemayr does is simplifies matters quite a lot and sort of boils down authoritarianism into three components which are conventionalism, aggression and submission. So the idea is authoritarians tend to be more likely to submit to hierarchical group structures. Authoritarians tend to endorse, especially in the West, Judeo Christian values. And then authoritarians tend to show aggressive tendencies against those who may violate these, these kind of norms or tendencies. And so the kind of complexity that you saw with early authoritarianism work is, is pared down quite a lot. The focus in Altemayr's rendering though, tends to be right wing authoritarianism and understanding authoritarianism on the political right. This is of course, you know, in some sense a strength and a limitation. It's a strength in that he's actually focusing directly on one, one sort of side of the ideological spectrum. It's a weakness because we don't really know about authoritarianism on the political left. And we can certainly return to that if we want to talk about that later. The, the point, the point being that Altamir, to simplify things and what we do is we kind of pick up on this in a way and use a measure of authoritarianism which is different from Altemyer's work and I think, we think captures a broader kind of like array of authoritarians in that it's not necessarily just right wing authoritarianism. And our focus is on again, kind of this fundamental tension between conformity and, and autonomy as measured in people's orientations towards child rearing. So we use child rearing as a kind of apolitical or non political means of measuring authoritarianism and these individual authoritarian tendencies and sort of how they revolve around people's orientation towards raising kids.
- [16:56]
Lily Gorn
Chris, anything you want to add to that?
- [16:59]
Christopher Federico
Yeah. So again, this, the construct conceptually has its origins in social theory. It finds its way into personality psychology in the mid 20th century. It's forgotten for a while and then it comes back and psychologists bring it back. So how does it escape containment within psychology? Well, starting in the 1990s, but not exclusively, political scientists start to develop an interest in this as one potential psychological dimension that might explain mass political attitudes. And in particular our co Author Stanley Feldman, along with Karen Stenner in the late 1990s, played a key role in advancing the measurement of authoritarianism using very brief, simple measures of childering the values. So why do they do that? One problem is that conventional psychological measures of authoritarianism, number one, they're often extremely long, up to 36 items, sometimes longer. You cannot get that into a survey like the American National Election Studies, the General Social Survey, the Congressional Election Study or anything like that. It just will not work. It's not economically efficient. The other problem though, and the more substantive problem, is that along one of the many criticisms that Chris referred to of measures of authoritarianism is that they often confuse the independent variable and the dependent variable. Often we are trying to come up with some sort of psychological construct, some sort of individual difference that reflects proneness to obedience and conformity. Conformity and use that to predict things like policy attitudes, voting, ideological preferences and what have you. But the problem is that both the original F scale that Adorno et al. Developed and Altemeyer's later right wing Authoritarianism scale, they have a lot of manifest political content in the items. They will ask about very specific political issues, about groups of people, about political actors, about things that government should do, and so on and so forth. So there's a lot of tautology when you use a measure like that to predict political attitudes and behavior. You've got the same thing on both sides of the equation. So one thing that Stanley, Karen and others wanted to do was kind of purge the independent variable, the right hand, right hand side variable of all that political content and the child rearing items to a large extent, not completely. They do that. They basically just ask respondents, you know, in rearing children or in raising children, which of the following traits should be emphasized. And it's things like good manners versus creativity, obedience versus independence and things like that. You're not specifically asking about say, LGBT rights or anything like that.
- [20:09]
Lily Gorn
That.
- [20:10]
Christopher Federico
So that's one element of it. Political scientists didn't come up with this idea originally. There were arguments among sociologists, from sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s, that sort of attitudes toward how strict child rearing should be was sort of a basic underlying dimension of how human beings thought about relationships within groups, within, within families and what have you. And it's sort of a universal dimension you could look at if you wanted to measure beliefs about conformity, authority, tightness of social relations within groups without getting into explicit political details. So really, two things there. One, it's a short measure, and number two, it kind of takes us away from some of the political content that confuses the analysis.
- [21:04]
Lily Gorn
And one of the things that you talk about in, in the book is not just authoritarianism and the attraction to it or the inclination towards it, but also non authoritarianism, which is the other side of the equation. And I was intrigued by this because obviously we have these measures of right wing authoritarianism and the Fs, the fascist scale. But what is essentially non authoritarianism as you discuss it in the book?
- [21:36]
Christopher Weber
This is a, this is a really good question because again what, what, what we're doing is we are relying on a, a measure where it, it sort of, it ranges from authoritarian child rearing to non authoritarian child rearing. So what is non authoritarian child rearing? Well, it's like it's emphasizing goals that kind of hinge on personal autonomy. So prioritizing things like creativity over obedience. So high scores on this scale are authoritarian respondents or authoritarian responses. So these are like the value and conformity over autonomy goals. What's useful about this measure is that the, the measure itself doesn't really doesn't range from left wing authoritarian to right wing authoritarian. It ranges from non authoritarian to authoritarian. Again like that could be a strength. We might view it as a strength, it might be a weakness. We view it as a strength in the sense that there isn't anything that is inherently political about the construct. It's an orientation towards child rearing. So presumably like we should be able to detect authoritarians on the political right and the political left in the sense that right wing and left wing authoritarians should score high on this scale. And you know, those who prioritize autonomy should score it low on the scale that like it lends itself to. I mean it, it has this, this, the scale has like these useful psychometric properties in the sense that that, that it, it, it's devoid of political content. But it does kind of leave open this interesting question which we parse in the book which is like who are the non authoritarians? Non authoritarians, just like authoritarians could be right leaning or could be left leaning non authoritarians. In a sense we might think of as libertarians, but we also might think about non authoritarians as being potentially the sort of more left leaning folks who, you know, don't necessarily buy into authoritarian politics, that sort of thing. So where am I going with this? The non authoritarian side of things makes things interesting in our analysis in that when we're sort of like looking at this sorting process, we don't always see symmetric trends when comparing the authoritarians to the non authoritarians. Because again, there, there is some ideological diversity, maybe not a lot on, on both sides of the scale.
- [24:38]
Christopher Federico
Yeah. So what I would add, the only thing I would add to that is that the basic dimension of authoritarianism that we measure using the child rearing scale, it corresponds to a basic trade off in a human social organization between autonomy on one hand and conformity, order and obedience on the other. And you don't want to fall too much into the trap of valorizing either side of those, either side of that spectrum. Both of those things to some extent are absolutely required by a functional social system. There are some situations in which rule following and obedience to legitimate authority are absolutely necessary for human social functioning. At the same time, authority can become a trap. There are corrupt authority figures. Too much conformity will leave you in a situation where in a challenging or novel situation you might not have the diversity or of thought that you need to kind of come up with a unique mutated solution to whatever challenge is out there. So this is sort of a, it represents a universal tradeoff. And part of what we get at is that there are different types of individuals. Some people have traits that kind of put them closer to the conformity side of the tr, others toward the autonomy side. One argument that's made by psychology, at psychologists at this point that study this is that there may be human variation on this trait simply because it was good for groups to have people with both characteristics at different points, though both of those traits would be selected to some extent. But it does reflect a basic dimension of human personality that in turn reflects a basic trade off in human social work organization.
- [26:39]
Lily Gorn
And, and so one of the things that you sort of talk about through the book and you're, you're sort of trying to get at this in terms of understanding the inclination or the, the move in the United States and to a lesser degree elsewhere. But you're specifically looking at the United States of people who are more attracted and to authoritarianism and how that's demonstrated politically. And you talk about particularly what your findings generated, which was that there were white voters in the United States who were moving in a particular direction. Can you explain a little bit about like what the findings sorted out in that regard?
- [27:32]
Christopher Weber
Sure. So a key part of the book and what we demonstrate is this process of authoritarian led sorting. We start the analysis in 1992, mainly because that's the first year that the authoritarian item, the authoritarian scale as included. So we can't really go back much further than 1992. It would be nice if we Could. But the, the general idea, what we will we find or what we try to demonstrate is that authoritarians since the early 90s have have sort of steadily sorted into the, the Republican Party. Authoritarians who were in the Democratic Party moved to the Republican Party over time. So there's this, this, this shift that's, that's pretty stark and that if we just like look at the relationship between authoritarianism and partisanship over time the relationship grows pretty considerably since 92. The important part of our story I think as well is that this process kind of goes and fits and starts. It doesn't, it's, it's, it's not constant. There are some years, there's some election years where we see a really strong relationship between partisanship and authoritarianism and then other election years where it's a much more dampened relationship. So it's not as if we've seen this, this, this tendency of authoritarians moving to the Republican Party in sort of equal numbers in every election. That's, that's really not what's happened. Our focus and our analysis I should say is, tends to focus on, on white respondents for several reasons. Theoretically, this is an important group when we think about authoritarians and sort of conventional values and how this process pans out. In many ways authoritarianism should have a stronger effect among white respondents or white voters in, in the US over the last 20, 30 years. Another issue is just data availability and that we don't have a whole lot of data of data from non white respondents up until, you know, like the, the past several elections. So there is, there is just that, that limitation, that limitation as well. So the argument again that you know, like authoritarians have moved to the Republican Party is, is, is definitely clear and pretty pronounced over time. The story of the non authoritarians is, is different and also interesting. We don't see the same like exodus of non authoritarians from the Republican Party like we saw authoritarians from the Democratic Party. And again, this sort of speaks to this measurement issue or measurement characteristic of the authoritarian scale itself and that non authoritarians aren't necessarily inherently right or left leaning. In fact, again, we can think of libertarians as being an example of a non authoritarian who tends to, and a group who tends to align with, with the Republican Party. And so this is actually what we see is that we don't see this exodus of non authoritarians as quickly. Non authoritarians don't necessarily leave the Republican Party in droves or anything. If anything, they move to the independent label rather than the Democratic label. And this has been the case up up until, you know, recently. I would say that we. We don't see that. That sort of same symmetry, or we don't see authority, the same effect of. Of. Of. Of sorting among the non. Authoritarians.
- [31:49]
Christopher Federico
Yeah. So I think one way to think about our work is it is sort of this sorting of the American electorate on the basis of authoritarianism or as a function of authoritarianism from early 1990s, which is really sort of the dawn of the era of cultural polarization as political scientists look at it through the present. But the thing we try to emphasize throughout is that it is a story of conditional or contingent sorting. And it's contingent in several important ways. Number one, it's contingent by group. So one thing that we focus on a lot at the beginning of the story is that this is really a lot of the sorting you do see is stuff that is predominantly happening among white Americans. So why we do. There are authoritarian black voters, there are authoritarian Hispanic voters, but we do not see them sort to the same extent, especially among black voters. And what we find is that the sort of scope of socially conservative attitudes or culturally conservative attitudes that authoritarianism is associated with is different for white Americans on one hand, and then black and Hispanic Americans on the other. For white Americans, it's associated very much with what we would think of as, you know, typical social issues along the lines of religion, morality, tightness of social relations, traditional values, and what have you. The same goes for black Americans and Hispanics Americans. You will typically find, for example, that people who are high in authoritarianism, regardless of what group they're from, they tend to be more opposed to LGBTQ rights, for example. However, there's additional set of issues that pertain to racial equality, multiculturalism, openness to diversity in racial and ethnic terms, and so on and so forth. Among white Americans, authoritarianism is very much associated with a desire for sort of a monochromatic America. It's associated with racial resentment, with opposition to immigration, and so on and so forth. You do not observe that to the same extent among black Americans and Hispanic Americans. So to a far lesser extent, black Americans who are high in authoritarianism, for example, are less likely to be hostile to government efforts to guarantee racial equality or to immigration. So we see that basic asymmetry. And for that reason, we kind of predicted and found that we would mainly see this pattern of overtime sorting mainly among white Americans. And that, indeed, is what we found. The other sort of contingency that we like to focus on a lot is it really kind of depends on the political contest question, a lot of the sorting really happens at critical time periods. It's not happening in a linear, steady state fashion. So there were a couple of critical elections we focus on, particularly 2004 and then 2016 and 2020, where the respective Democratic and Republican candidates were very much separated in terms of their sociocultural views and also in terms of the extent to which they adopted a quote, unquote, strongman style that was going to where in particular, the Republican candidate wanted to protect America from some threat. First such example was in 2004, after the first presidential election, after 911 and after the global wine terror had started. There was a great division between the parties and the party's candidates in terms of this sort of protection element, of things, of kind of protecting America from threats from outside. In 2016 and 2020, it's really Trump that sharply differentiates the Republican Party in terms of its explicit, overt appeals to authoritarianism, exclusion, and what have you. So we see sharper divides among white Americans as a function of authoritarianism, particularly in those years. In other years where the Republicans, for example, nominated more moderate candidates, say John McCain in 20, in 2008, or Mitt Romney in 2012, things were muted. And there were other years where, you know, the primary salient topic was actually economic. So, for example, 2008 or the 1992 election, there you see a more muted effect of authoritarianism. But the times at which you really see this boost in sorting, in partisan sorting among white Americans as a function of authoritarianism is during those critical elections where the parties are very heavily differentiated. And we run experiments also in the book where we kind of manipulate the extent to which the Democratic and Republican candidates are different from one another. And really what we find there is that the candidates have to be sharply differentiated, not so much on economic issues, but on social issues. So that's one other sort of important conditionality.
- [37:24]
Christopher Weber
I would say that with like, just to. To build on that. The book is very much a political psychology book. And what I sort of mean by this is that our interest is in understanding authoritarianism. What it is, that sort of constellation of policy attitudes that go with authoritarianism, how it's maybe like authoritarianism bundles policies differently or acts as a sort of a different way to structure policies among white versus, you know, black or Hispanic voters. But the focus is also on the role of politics and how politics itself and the decisions made by political elites, the political parties, in, in many ways activates or resonates with authoritarians. So, you know, it's not that Authoritarianism has effects in a vacuum, but rather authoritarianism is expressed in various ways, in different ways depending on the rhetoric at the time, who is in power and what are the sort of salient issues of the day. And these two things, you know, which we show in the book interact again politics and personality in really kind of interesting and important ways and sort of speak to this, this notion of non constant authoritarian led sorting.
- [38:52]
Lily Gorn
And so I just wanted to ask you for a quick overview. I mean you talk about the fact that you use the American National Election surve as a, as a cornerstone in terms of information that you're gathering, but can you just give us a sort of bird's eye view of the sort of way you went around researching and surveying for the, for the book in order to generate this information?
- [39:18]
Christopher Weber
Yeah, so we, we rely heavily on the American National Election Studies, you know, for one obvious reason. We weren't, we weren't all in the field in 1992 thinking of what we would put together for a book we would publish in 2026. And so what we've done is really relied heavily on those four child rearing questions and use the, you know, the historical time series NES data to look at how folks change in the expression of their authoritarianism over time. We do have other data in the book that we rely on, so we rely on panel data sets as well where we look at individual change. So do authoritarian sort of shift, shift from one party to another? Do they move from the Democratic label to the Republican label from one election to the next? So again, we've got some panel surveys that we use in chapter six of the book touches on this. We rely on another, a large study survey called the Voter Study Group, as well as several experiments that we conducted to get sort of a better understanding of the causal effect here. But yeah, the idea is to rely on a variety of data sources that span a long enough period of time to again sort of document how this authoritarian led political process has panned out over time.
- [41:11]
Christopher Federico
Yeah, so I guess the one thing I would add to that is that there were different things that we were trying to do in different parts of the book and they required different sorts of data. So you know, again, if you look at the book Pride of Place in terms of the data really does go to the American National Election Study series. And you know, the reason for that is number one, it's about the highest quality data we have available to us as political scientists in particular, but social scientists in general. And it also covers a wide swath of time that we are interested in from historical perspective, basically from the early 1990s up through roughly the present. So if you want to have the same measures from different samples repeated over time, that's your best bet. But that's not the only thing that we were interested in doing. There were two other things we were kind of interested, number one, what's happening among individuals. So when you look at the ANEs like we do and compare, say, 1992 to 2016 and 2020, those are different groups of people. It's a very different group of people that was sampled or surveyed in 1992 than in 2016. But one thing we're interested in is, is there individual level change? So can you say that a person who is more authoritarian at time one is more likely to kind of become republican over time within that individual? And you know, the sort of traditional time series studies that the ANES has won't let you do that. So what we need to do is we need to look at, first of all at panel studies. So there are several ANES studies, but also the voter study group data that Chris referred to that are panel studies. They essentially measure or interview the same individuals at different points in time. So you can find out at time one how individuals differ in authoritarianism, and you can see whether individuals who have different levels of authoritarianism are more likely to change their partisanship later on. I, you know, we identified several elections where maximal change occurred because the parties were really differentiating themselves from one another. So 2004, 2016 and 2020, or to put it another way, the period between 2016 and 2020. So what we wanted to do was see whether individuals who differed in authoritarianism at time one kind of adopted new partisan identities, labels, or vote choices over time as individuals. So that was sort of the second type of data we needed to look at. The last thing we wanted to do was kind of get some level of experimental control over, you know, what kind of candidates people were being asked to make judgments about. And so in one of our chapters, we actually experimentally manipulated and randomly assigned people to get make choices between different types of candidates. And again, what we found there is that you could sort of eliminate the effect of authoritarianism on vote choice among white Americans if you reduced the social issue differentiation between the candidates different. Reducing the amount of differentiation on economic issues really didn't do it. So this kind of allowed us to provide a more controlled form of evidence for this idea that authoritarianism really starts to predict vote choices and things like that when the parties are heavily differentiated on social and cultural matters.
- [45:04]
Lily Gorn
So that the question of economics, which is oftentimes what we think is what people are making their decisions on, is not necessarily the case for those who are more inclined towards authoritarianism. That's correct.
- [45:19]
Christopher Weber
That's absolutely correct. Yes.
- [45:21]
Lily Gorn
Which is fascinating because generally speaking, everybody thinks it's all about how much money you have or don't have to spend. And as we are in the price, the time of high gas prices right now, it is an interesting consideration. So I have one last question which is much more theoretical than it is necessarily based in the data that you've seen. But the sort of foundational myth of the United States States is that we are sort of individuals and that we don't incline towards a lot of hierarchy and that we are a nation that is much more inclined towards sort of being on our own and doing our own thing. Can you put that in context of the inclination towards authoritarianism, either of you?
- [46:26]
Christopher Federico
Well, a lot of what we're trying to do is get at individual differences that exist within a particular social context. And here we can think of the United States as a particular social context. As a nation traditionally, you know, if you buy, you know, a story that has been expounded by folks from the Tocqueville to Hartz to others, we're a very individualistic nation. Our self understanding is disproportionately shaped by classical liberalism. So one thing you can argue is that all other things being equal. Yes. Compared to other types of societies, we're more individualistic in this sort of corporate, classically liberal sense. That said, even within that common culture, individuals, in terms of their psychological makeup, they vary in the extent to which they seek autonomy versus want more uniformity. So even within that sort of general tendency for America to be a culturally or classically liberal society, you're going to see variation. And we have to try to make sense of that variation within that single context. So that is part of what we were doing. I would argue basically, or we would argue that even in a society where people kind of self conceptualize or collectively self conceptualize as good individualist, functionally speaking, in terms of our psychological makeup, we there's some of us are going to be more oriented toward autonomy, others are going to be more oriented toward wanting to see uniformity and things like that. There are a bunch of other issues you can get into there, but I'll leave it at that for now. And like Chris, weigh in.
- [48:25]
Christopher Weber
Yeah, so you might think of it as. I definitely think of it in that way, but extending, extending this even a bit more. There is an adaptive quality to authoritarianism. Like we, we. I would think groups wouldn't function, society wouldn't function well if everyone was challenging and questioning authority all of the, all of the time. And so the kind of distinction between authoritarianism as a psychological predisposition and sort of like what it says about groups and group structures is a bit different from the kind of politics of authoritarianism and the founding myths we might, you know, sort of tell ourselves about, about what, what defines the United States and what are kind of the core values that, that define, define the country. And so when we look at like any given society or any, you know, given country, you'll always find authoritarians. There's always some facet or some, some subset of the population which is sort of more, or are sort of more inclined to, to prioritize conformity values. And so it, in that sense, you know, that maybe that there isn't as much of a disconnect as it might seem. One of the things we also sort of document in the book is the relationship between authoritarianism and democratic values. You know, you might sort of think about extreme versions of authoritarianism are not democratic. So how do authoritarians express their, their views about democracy and elections and these kind of things? And what, what we tend to find is that authoritarians show sort of more lukewarm support for democratic values and institutions. But it's not as if they abandon these things wholeheartedly. In fact, we find this kind of principle implementation gap where we might even think some of these myths or characteristics that define the country in the abstract. Authoritarians and non authoritarians as well kind of support these principles at a different rate than the actual implementation or again, sort of expression of these more abstract values, again like this kind of disconnect between the predisposition and the politics.
- [51:10]
Lily Gorn
And so I wanted to ask you both, what are you working on now? Are you collaborating again or are you working on things that are distinct?
- [51:19]
Christopher Federico
We're not collectively meaning Weber, Federico and Feldman working on anything, but we do have our different projects right now. This Federico, the next thing that you know, I'm working on is a new book with a current graduate student of mine named Nicholas Campos. And over the last few years we've been at work on a new conceptualization and measurement strategy for making sense of affective polarization. How is it that people come to dislike out partisans, like in partisans, and kind of diverge in those two things? We've been working on that for a couple of years. We just put out a paper on it in the APSR last year. Right now we're working on turning it into a book project. We managed to accumulate a lot of data over the last few years and we've kind of decided that a book length project would be sort of the best way of presenting that. So right now working on kind of unpacking the psychology and multi dimensionality of affective polarization, particularly in the United States, but also in other democracies as well.
- [52:47]
Lily Gorn
Wonderful.
- [52:47]
Christopher Weber
And Chris, so I'm, I'm also working on a book have been for the past couple years with co authors at, at several Western US Universities, Chris Karpowitz at byu, Julie Juliet Carlile at University of Utah, Mark Ramirez and Fabian Nooner at asu. The project is on attitudes towards democracy, particularly a thing which we unpack in a couple of papers, but we will in the book as well. And this concept we call electoral contestation, it's a measure of sort of people's willingness to challenge free and fair elections in a variety of ways and how attitudes towards these behavior behaviors shift depending on who wins elections, who's in charge. Right. And, and in sort of we like look at the, again, kind of the dimensionality of the construction, how it relates to other things, how it more broadly kind of relates to democratic backsliding in the US as well as potentially other contexts as well, and sort of just speaks to the resilience or lack thereof of democratic values in American elections.
- [54:15]
Lily Gorn
I look forward to interviewing both of you separately, but with different co authors about these books as they come out, I hope.
- [54:25]
Christopher Weber
Thank you, Lily.
- [54:26]
Christopher Federico
Thank you very much.
- [54:28]
Lily Gorn
I would like to thank Chris, Federico and Chris Weber as well as the absent Stanley Feldman for talking to me today about the authoritarian divide, partisan identity, voting and the transformation of the American electorate. This is available at Oxford University Press's website and anyplace else anybody buys books. Thank you both for joining me today.
- [54:53]
Christopher Federico
Thank you, Lily.
- [54:54]
Christopher Weber
Thank you, Lily.
- [54:55]
Lily Gorn
My pleasure. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and Blue sky with the handle New Books Network and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooks network substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.