The rise of fascist parties in the 1920s and 30s in Europe and Japan lead to the search for an explanation. Although all the western economies and most of the world were affected by the depression, Italy, Germany, and Japan, along with a large number of less powerful countries, moved to fascism dramatically, while Britain, the U. S. and others didn’t. France was a separate case, politically immobilized by parliamentary stalemate.
As the fascist nations rapidly morphed into authoritarianism the outside world watched their spectacular and largely unexampled internal political behavior. Initial world opinion was mixed, and it was by no means clear to many that fascism was altogether a bad solution to the time’s problems. The interest increased and was tinged with alarm, until the world was drawn into total war. After the war the surviving nations were left with the need to restore the fallen nations, the desire to avoid another such disaster, and an increasingly haunting picture of just how terrible the war had been. Concepts of human nature were badly shaken up.
It was in this environment that T. W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson, and R. N. Sanford began their research into the nature of authoritarianism. The results of the ten-year study were published in 1950 in the classic book, “The Authoritarian Personality.”
Adorno and Frenkel-Brunswik both came from a European intellectual background and were committed to a Freudian/Marxist foundation for social theory. Adorno was a twelve-tone (avant garde) Viennese musician and presumably not welcome in Greater Germany. Their research was conducted at Berkeley.
The book attributed European fascism to child-rearing practices, based on a Freudian psychodynamic mechanism which starts with overly-authoritarian child rearing and results in a durable personality type. This personality type included nine different dispositions which the authors believed reflected different aspects of a single underlying disposition.
Besides this explanatory theory, the group developed an instrument (a validated questionnaire) that revealed nine factors that constitute the authoritarian personality. [Duckitt 2015] The nine factors they identified were:
This theory clearly was an answer to the question, “What caused European fascism?” It was met with enthusiasm initially, but was scientifically lacking in several ways. The psychodynamic (Freudian) mechanism offered to explain the phenomenon is neither provable nor disprovable, and hence is not a scientific explanation. The F scale (“F” for fascism), on which their conclusions are based, was a questionnaire in which a “Yes” answer always implied authoritarianism. This makes it vulnerable to “acquiescence bias,” the tendency that we have to agree rather than disagree. When attempts were made to correct this, the questionnaire no longer provided clear results, and the nine dispositions no longer appeared to reflect a single underlying factor.
Finally, the theory that authoritarian attitudes are the result of durable personality traits entirely fails to account for the waves and troughs of authoritarianism that are part of the historic record.
The Adorno theory faded into the background as post-war recovery proceeded, communism became a greater concern than resurgent fascism, and authoritarianism was no longer associated primarily with fascism.
Adorno and his colleagues designed a questionnaire which, they believed, reveals the “fascist inclination” of those who complete the questionnaire. How much truth is there to this claim?
The question is easier to ask than to answer. From one perspective, any such scale is just what it is, no more and no less. A group of people made up a set of questions and a grading procedure that produces some scores. It is what it is. You or I can make up our own scale too, if we like.
From the perspective of science that answer is unsatisfactory.
If you drill down one level, you are looking at the nine component factors, and you can see that “fascist inclination” is a composite. Each of the components is less abstract than the overall measure. The F score is a weighted blending of the nine factors. The F scale then isn’t merely a sum of scores, but a theory that certain dispositions result in a political inclination.
Consider then the first factor of the scale. It is labeled “Conventionalism” and described as “adherence to conventional values in behavior and speech.” This factor too has a numerical score which is calculated from the subject’s answers to a small set of questions that appear on the questionnaire. I haven’t listed the questions here, but if I had, you could examine them and form an opinion as to whether they reasonably reflect the label and description. This is essentially how researchers initially generate such questionnaires. Unlike me (if I were to develop my own scale) they do this on a foundation of social-psychological knowledge and theory, and an awareness of the meanings that the various terms have within their discipline. Then they test the questionnaire.
Scales such as the F scale are essentially definitions. In the jargon of science the F scale is an “operational definition” of fascist personality. The scale, in other words, is a procedure (an “operation”) for quantifying fascist personality. This is how scientists endeavor to tie down an abstract and vague idea so that it can be studied. The value of such a scale comes from its accuracy and usefulness. Its accuracy is judged, to the extent this is possible, by the fit between its results and reality. Its usefulness is judged within the context of fact and theory that are accepted within the expert community. If the pieces (facts, definitions, and theories) don’t fit together, you change them until they do. (Ideally you “change” facts by adding to them.)
The criticism cited above, that the F scale doesn’t deal with “acquiescence bias,” questions its accuracy. The criticism that it doesn’t account for the dynamic nature of authoritarianism speaks to its usefulness within our overall understanding of authoritarianism.
Researchers speak of the reliability and validity of such scales rather than their accuracy or truth. “Reliability” generally means repeatability. For example, since the F scale is meant to reveal a stable aspect of personality, it should yield similar results when completed by the same subject after a lapse of time. If it doesn’t, it is unreliable.
Validity can have a number of meanings. All of the forms of validity are measured subjectively. “Face validity” is the degree to which a scale seems to measure what it claims to measure. If I were to review the questions on the F scale questionnaire, I would be assessing its face validity. “Criterion validity” refers to the degree to which the scale matches some criterion variable that it is expected to match. If the F scale gave a low score to people who were agreed to be archetypal fascists, its criterion validity might be in question. “Construct validity” addresses the fit between the scale and the theory it is meant to support. The scale’s construct validity can’t be assessed without also considering the theory. The development of theories of conservatism thus is hand-in-hand with the development of psychometric scales, as described in the remaining essays.
If you’re vigilant, you will have noticed that we’re now talking authoritarianism rather than conservatism. You’ll see in the list of factors making up the F scale that some of those factors are evocative of main-stream conservatism while others are more evocative of authoritarianism. You’ll see in the following essay that the F scale factors have been superseded by subsequent work. Stay tuned. This is how science works.
Next: Two Types of Conservatism: Conformity and Dominance
© 2021, Ross A. Hangartner