Next, you might rightly be wondering how state lawmakers had time to fill out surveys mailed to them by an obscure Canadian researcher, when they were supposed to be busy with The Public Business. Lawmakers are busy, and that’s probably one of the reasons I only heard from 1,233 (or 26%) of the 4,741 U.S. legislators I sent surveys to. Such a low return rate immediately raises the question of a self-selection sample bias, right? What would the results have been if everybody had responded, instead of only one-quarter?
Luckily you can estimate this with one of the crafty stratagems in the survey-givers’ bag of tricks. Let’s say, just to pick a wild possibility, you’re interested in whether Republican lawmakers score higher on the RWA scale than Democrats do. You look at the states you barely heard from, and then at the states where you got a much better return. Obviously you’re inclined to trust the latter results more. Making this comparison, you find that the higher the return rate was, the more Republicans tended to differ from Democrats. The smaller samples tended to cloud this relationship—which is a major problem with small samples. But it also means that if I had heard back from everyone, the difference would likely be substantially bigger than what actually turned up.
We’ll focus on the results obtained, not what I imagine they might be. But if you are admirably wondering about the response rate—which few readers do, and which few survey-takers even report— a self-selection sample bias certainly compromises my lawmaker studies. The numbers I obtained are “low balls.” Right-wing authoritarianism probably packs a bigger punch in American state legislatures than my data will show. We should keep that in mind. If I had heard from everyone, the bad things would likely be even worse.
Well, what differences did turn up? I sent the thirty-item RWA scale I was using in my research then to fifty legislative chambers, and in every single one except the Louisiana House, the Republicans scored higher overall than the Democrats.
Although the “right-wing” in right-wing authoritarianism refers to a psychological trait that endorses submission to established authority (see chapter 1), not a political ideology, the RWA scale finds different levels of this trait in politicians from the two parties.[3] The Republicans scored almost 40 points higher than the Democrats on the average, on the 30-item scale.
Figure 5.1 shows the average score of each caucus in each of the chambers I approached (viz., eleven senates and thirty-nine lower chambers). (The numbers on the scale have been reset in terms of the twenty-item measure we have been talking about since chapter 1.) Several things may leap out at you. First, the Democrats landed all over the place. The Republicans on the other hand crowd together so much that the person who drew this figure almost went crazy trying to jam all the names into such a small space. Second, as you would expect from the last paragraph, very few Democratic caucuses posted RWA scale scores as high as most of the Republicans did. The Democrats may be all over the place, but they’re mainly all over a less authoritarian place than Republican Country. Third, with the inevitable exceptions, southern legislators posted the highest scores.
Other Issues
I usually included some other measure besides the RWA scale on the surveys I mailed to the state capitols, and accordingly I found that high RWA lawmakers tended to:
-not think wife abuse was a serious issue (a weak relationship; see note 12 of Chapter 1)
- have conservative economic philosophies (a moderate relationship)
- score highly on items assessing racial and ethnic prejudice (a moderate relationship)
- reject a law raising the income tax rate for the rich and lowering it for the poor (a moderate relationship)
- favor capital punishment (a sturdy relationship)
- oppose gun control laws (a sturdy relationship)
- favor a law prohibiting television broadcasts from a foreign country’s capital (such as Baghdad during the Gulf War) when the United States is at war with that country (a sturdy relationship)
- favor a law requiring Christian religious instruction in public schools (a sturdy relationship)
- score high in dogmatism (a sturdy relationship)
- oppose a law requiring affirmative action in state hiring that would give priority to qualified minorities until they “caught up” (a sturdy relationship)
- favor a law giving police much less restrictive wiretap, search-and-seizure, and interrogation rules (a strong relationship)
- favor a law outlawing the Communist Party “and other radical political organizations” (a strong relationship)
- oppose the Equal Rights Amendment (a strong relationship)
- favor placing greater restrictions on abortion than “Roe versus Wade” (a strong relationship)
- favor a law restricting anti-war protests to certain sizes, times, and places— generally away from public view—while American troops are fighting overseas (a very strong relationship)
- have a “We were the good guys, the Soviets were the bad guys” view of the Cold War (a very strong relationship)
- oppose a law extending equal rights to homosexuals in housing and employment (a very strong relationship)
Figure 5.1
Average RWA Scale Scores of American State Legislators, by State and Party
Notes: Scores have been re-scaled from a 30-item basis to a 20-item basis. The midpoint of the scale is 100. The sample includes 549 Republican legislators and 682 Democrats. Scores from upper chambers are presented in larger print (e.g. CONNECTICUT versus Connecticut). No Connecticut Democratic senator, and only one Mississippi Republican and one Wyoming Democratic senator answered, and hence no scores are given for those caucuses.
If you have read the preceding chapters, or been paying attention to what’s going on in your state capitol lately, none of this will astound you. What surprised me was how strong the relationships usually were. The RWA scale can predict what many lawmakers want to do about a wide variety of important issues.
Because they harbor so many authoritarian sentiments, Republican legislators naturally differed from Democrats overall on the matters above. But the differences were sharpest when you compared high RWA versus low RWA lawmakers, whatever their party affiliation. Many high RWA Democrats, and some low RWA Republicans appeared in these samples. The problem, as I see it, does not arise from Republicans per se but from the right-wing authoritarians on both sides of the aisle. But the data make it quite clear that when you see a bunch of Republican lawmakers huddling, you’re probably looking at mainly high RWAs, whereas when (non-southern) Democrats cluster, they’re probably a pretty unauthoritarian lot overall.
Double Highs in the Legislatures?
I noted in chapter 3 that designing despots will usually slither over to the political right, not just because their hearts and minds lead them there, but because that’s where the “easy sell” high RWAs congregate, wanting to play follow-the-leader. It’s the easiest place to pick up a loyal following cheap, especially if you’re a Double High. Therefore, were the high RWA state legislators in these studies not just high RWAs, but usually Double Highs? Were they social dominators as well?