What Are You Afraid of? Authoritarianism, Terrorism, and Threat

Abstract

Research on authoritarianism has provided conflicting findings on its relationship with threat. Some studies indicate that in the face of heightened threat individuals with stronger authoritarian predispositions express more right-wing and illiberal preferences; others suggest that it is individuals at the other end of the continuum, with weak authoritarian dispositions—libertarians—who are most likely to change and express such attitudes. Extant efforts to reconcile the differences have been unsatisfactory. We offer a new perspective in which both processes may occur simultaneously. Higher authoritarians are responsive to elevated “normative threat,” characterized by dissatisfaction with established parties and their leaders and perceptions of “belief diversity,” while libertarians respond with more right-wing and illiberal preferences to heightened physical and personal threat, such as from terrorism, which does not affect high authoritarians. We suggest different contexts in which normative threat and personal threat vary, and we are thus likely to see change either in individuals toward one or other end of the authoritarian continuum or among both. Drawing on data in the quasi-experimental context of the 2017 general election in Britain, during which there were two terror attacks, we confirm this pattern in a setting in which both personal and normative threat were elevated.