Cognitive ability and authoritarianism: Understanding support for Trump and Clinton

By Becky L. Choma, Yaniv Hanoch. 2017

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract With Donald Trump the Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton the Democratic nominee for the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, speculations of why Trump resonates with many Americans are widespread - as are suppositions of whether, independent of party identification, people might vote for Hillary Clinton. The present study, using a sample of American adults (n = 406), investigated whether two ideological beliefs, namely, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) uniquely predicted Trump support and voting intentions for Clinton. Cognitive ability as a predictor of RWA and SDO was also tested. Path analyses, controlling for political party identification, revealed that higher RWA and SDO uniquely predicted more favorable attitudes of Trump, greater intentions to vote for Trump, and lower intentions to vote for Clinton. Lower cognitive ability predicted greater RWA and SDO and indirectly predicted more favorable Trump attitudes, greater intentions to vote for Trump and lower intentions to vote for Clinton.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/621a345be03e88718ba98f535d51b79c3c16a333

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Citations in the corpus

Why are conservatives less concerned about the coronavirus (COVID-19) than liberals? Comparing political, experiential, and partisan messaging explanations (2020, background): “…and theory suggesting strong ties between conservative ideology and threat (e.g., Altemeyer, 1996; Duckitt & Sibley, 2010; Feldman, 2003; see Choma & Hanoch, 2017, for discussion) – and especially to direct physical threats such as disease (for summaries, see Conway et al., 2019; Crawford,…”
Social Psychological Perspectives on Trump Supporters (2017, unknown): “In agreement, Choma and Hanoch (2017), analyzing data from aMechanical Turk sample of 406 American adults, found that both authoritarianism (r = +.46) and SDO (r = +.48) correlated highly (p .001) with the intention to vote for Trump.”
The Racial and Economic Context of Trump Support (2018, background): “…to crave strong leaders and social order (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950; Altemeyer, 1996)—and to social dominance orientation (SDO; Choma & Hanoch, 2017)—a propensity to believe that some social groups are superior to others (Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994).”