Left-wing support of authoritarian submission to protect against societal threat

Abstract

New Zealand's Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, adopted a "go hard, go early" approach to eliminate COVID-19. Although Ardern and her Labour party are considered left-leaning, the policies implemented during the pandemic (e.g., police roadblocks) have the hallmarks of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). RWA is characterized by three attitudinal clusters (authoritarian aggression, submission, and conventionalism). The uniqueness of the clusters, and whether they react to environmental change, has been debated. Here, in the context of the pandemic, we investigate the relationship between political orientation and RWA. Specifically, we measured political orientation, support for New Zealand's major political parties, and RWA among 1,430 adult community members. A multivariate Bayesian model demonstrated that, in the middle of a pandemic, both left-leaning and right-leaning individuals endorsed items tapping authoritarian submission. In contrast to authoritarian submission, and demonstrating the multidimensional nature of RWA, we observed the typical relationships between political orientation and authoritarian aggression and conventionalism was observed.

Fig 1. Level of authoritarianism associated with different levels of support for the Labour and National parties.

Panel A shows results from Duckitt et al.’s [29] data using a similar regression analysis, whereas Panel B shows results from the present data collected in 2020. Error bands represent 95% credible intervals. Note. Negative values on the x-axis indicate lack of support for a party, whereas positive numbers indicate support for a party. The y-axis represents the level of response to each subscale identified above each panel where a higher number is a stronger response.