⌛This has been over 2 years in the making, and we call for (1) a more clear and careful labelling of political beliefs, and (2) the reassessment of the term authoritarianism and the need to not use it as a synonym for radical left-wing beliefs

📂Our data is available here: osf.io/fmkvx/

🗒️Our Stage 1 Registered Report is here: doi.org/10.17605/OSF...

✨In line with other authors, we suggest that ideological labeling of authoritarianism might hinder instead of help our understanding of it and that if we really want to assess authoritarianism across the ideological spectrum, we need a different approach than LWA and the way it is operationalized

✨While LWA as a construct captures dogmatic, rigid, and sometimes radical left-wing beliefs, it does assess authoritarianism

✨ In other words, our results indicate that while SLAV and established LWA measures assess left-wing beliefs, they DO NOT capture authoritarianism - in our samples, left-wing authoritarianism would be a misnomer for this cluster of beliefs, and it would be so because of the authoritarianism part

✨HOWEVER, and most crucially, we find almost no significant correlations to established measures of authoritarianism (whether they are right-wing or more neutral ones). When we find correlations, they are almost always negative rather than positive

✨...and related expectedly to previous operationalizations of LWA. Moreover, we found expected correlations of SLAV domains to variables of political and social beliefs, and cognitive style

✨The newly developed SLAV scale showed good factorial validity (with four interrelated but distinct domains of Anticapitalist Sentiment, Anticonventionalism, Antihierarhical aggression, and Censorship of right-wing ideas)...

✨We aimed to develop a scale that is not as US-centric as some previous operationalizations, and that is (1) more universally left-wing, (2) more directly authoritarian, and that it (3) includes a more direct tie to the economic axis

✨As a large majority of research on left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) was done in WEIRD countries, and countries with no legacy of left-wing regimes, we set out to develop a new LWA scale that would be more broadly applicable and validate in a post-communist country