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K. Stenner
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005; 392pp, EUR29.99 paper back
ISBN: 0-521-53478-x
I will be no exception in my initial thoughts when reading this book: 'another contribution on the authoritarian personality?' Despite the wide use of various measures of authoritarianism -- also in contemporary research -- many researchers agree to the criticisms that the original work of Adorno et al. and their successors encountered. Stenner however approaches the field with new ambition to solve the problematic issues. She challenges all previous work on authoritarianism, in particular the use of the Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale from Altmeyer. The main contribution of this book is that it shows which kinds of measurements are needed to assess the conditions in which authoritarianism is important for racial, political and moral intolerance. Let me give a brief summary of the content.
One of the main arguments for this book is that it has remained unclear under which conditions authoritarian predispositions will manifest themselves in specific attitudes and behaviours. Stenner proposes that authoritarianism -- defined as 'the appropriate balance between group authority and uniformity, on the one hand, and individual autonomy and diversity, on the other' (p. 14) -- is activated to result in racial, political and moral intolerance under the conditions of threats to oneness and sameness (normative threats). The question is how to measure this best?
Previous measurements of authoritarianism have been 'tautological with the dependent variables it is designed to explain' (p. 21). The RWA scale refers to what ought to be done with minorities and deviants, which are aspects of intolerance that authoritarianism initially set out to explain. Moreover, previous measurements turned out to be indistinguishable from measurements of conservatism. These are the two main reasons to refute Altemeyer's scale, which instantly prompts the important question how Stenner proposes to measure authoritarianism. She proposes a rather simple solution: measuring child rearing values (not how one is raised oneself). Those would 'reflect one's fundamental orientations towards authority/uniformity vs autonomy/difference' (p. 24). Only in a student sample she prefers the use of paired words, because students are still often under parental supervision.
Despite the centrality of the measurement, the reader has to search quite well to find out...