Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics by Marc J. Hetherington & Jonathan D. Weiler
Author:Marc J. Hetherington & Jonathan D. Weiler [Hetherington, Marc J.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Political Ideologies, Comparative Politics, 9780521884334, American Government, Fascism & Totalitarianism, General, Conservatism & Liberalism, Political Science
ISBN: 9780521884334
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2009-08-24T04:26:21.017236+00:00
114
Authoritarianism and Polarization
Illustrations
To illustrate our thinking, consider an analogy about vehicle preferences.
Should someone buy a Toyota Prius or a Hummer? The Prius is a small hybrid car that runs partly on gasoline and partly on electricity and gets well over fifty miles to the gallon of gas; the Hummer is a behemoth sport utility vehicle that weighs in at over 8,000 pounds and gets around ten miles to the gallon. With a few modifications, the Hummer is a military vehicle.
Those who value safety over other considerations will feel very secure in one. Since being carbon neutral is unlikely to become a central part of the decision-making calculus of this group, it seems unlikely that their preference will change. 3
Values are surely different among Prius drivers with principles more abstract than safety guiding the decision-making process. Instead of the effects of an accident on loved ones riding in the car, these people are probably more inclined to consider the effects of driving on the planet. Of course, both drivers are âright,â but for different reasons. No one can doubt that Priuses are better for the environment than are Hummers. But it is similarly obvious that people would be better off in a Hummer in a high-speed collision involving the two vehicles. In fact, in the instant before such a collision, an event that would certainly be very threatening to anyone with a pulse, the Prius driver might even wish he had chosen to drive a Hummer. The key point here is that under conditions of high perceived threat, the preferences of the Hummer driver remained constant while the preferences of the Prius driver changed (or should have).
Liberal television talk show host Bill Maher has seemed to suggest this relationship between threat and authoritarianism. Maherâs politics as articulated on his HBO series, Real Time, suggest a strongly nonauthoritarian bent.
He is proâgay rights, makes frequent reference to drug use, and criticizes the Republican base whenever presented the opportunity. However, months after the September 11 attacks, Maher stated that airport security screeners should profile passengers based on whether they appeared to be Muslims. Certainly racial or, in this case, religious profiling is antithetical to what appears to be his worldview, and he probably did not feel this way before terrorism became a more salient concern. But Maher likely flies a lot and would feel safer doing it if every potential Islamic extremist was patted down before getting on a plane 3 This comparison is probably not at all farfetched to make. The CCES survey that we have employed asked whether the respondent drove a pickup truck. Among those scoring at the minimum of the authoritarianism index, only about 24 percent reported driving a pickup.
Among those scoring at the maximum, 47 percent, or nearly twice the percentage as those scoring at the minimum, did so. If we control for a range of different demographics that might also predict what type of vehicle a person chooses, the effect of authoritarianism remains statistically significant (p<.001). Although the
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