The goal in The Authoritarian Dynamic was to develop and test a general theory of intolerance of difference. I began with the conviction that racial, political and moral intolerance, normally studied in isolation, are really kindred spirits: driven by the same fundamental predisposition, fueled by the same motives, exacerbated by the same fears. Certainly I was not discounting the value of providing a comprehensive account of all the ideas, interests and emotions influencing some specific expression of intolerance in a particular society. But it seemed to me that insufficient attention had been paid to developing a parsimonious model illuminating general regularities in intolerant behavior, one that could help all of us better understand the specific cases and particular expressions of intolerance of interest to us.
In The Authoritarian Dynamic, then, I revive the concept of 'authoritarianism', of a general predisposition to intolerance of difference. I manage to isolate and measure that predisposition in such a way as to avoid confounds with the attitudes and behaviors one is trying to explain: a previously inescapable tautology that had plagued prior research on authoritarianism, and reduced confidence in empirical results. I then develop and test a model--the 'authoritarian dynamic'--in which a good deal of the variance within, and a great deal of the variance across different 'varieties' of intolerance is explained by just two variables: one's fundamental predisposition to authoritarianism, interacting with changing environmental conditions of 'normative threat'. Importantly, the predispositions prove to be enduring and apparently innate, while these catalytic conditions turn out to be the central stuff of democratic politics: leaders proving fallible and unworthy of our trust, loss of confidence in institutions, high levels of disagreement and divided public opinion.
The Authoritarian Dynamic thus reconciles extant theories alternately emphasizing the individual psychology and environmental conditions conducive to intolerance. And it clarifies some persistent empirical puzzles thwarting prior attempts to give credence to the notion of authoritarianism: the mystery of a supposedly enduring predisposition that expresses itself to varying degrees in different situations; the puzzle of attitudes and behaviors, purportedly the product of individual psychology, that precipitously surge and decline in response to changing societal conditions. By means of precisely designed empirical tests--implemented by experimentally manipulating the conditions experienced by subjects with varying predispositions --I demonstrate that a wide array of behaviors considered antithetical to liberal democracy are substantially influenced by this simple predisposition responding to changing levels of normative threat.