National Threat and Political Culture:
Authoritarianism, Antiauthoritarianism,
and the September 11 Attacks
Andrew J. Perrin
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
This paper uses published letters to the editor of major U.S. newspapers to investigate the
cultural effects of a major national threat: the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It is
based on a hand-coded, stratiﬁed random sample of 1,100 letters to the editor published
in 17 major papers in the United States (544 pre-September 11, 556 post-September 11).
The letters are drawn from a population of 8,101 published letters. Degrees of both authoritarianism
and antiauthoritarianism, as well as the general salience of questions of authoritarianism,
rose signiﬁcantly in the post-attack period. The paper suggests that, instead of
a simple threat-authoritarianism causal link, authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism
are paired elements of political culture that are invoked together in the face of a national
threat.
KEYWORDS: authoritarianism; discourse; threat; terrorism; September 11, 2001
What effect does a major, national threat have on authoritarian and antiauthoritarian
political discourse? In this paper, I offer a novel approach to investigating
changes in American political discourse in the wake of the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001. I use a large sample of published letters to the editor to
investigate the inﬂuence on authoritarian and antiauthoritarian discourse of a
major threat of national scope. Letters published in the month following September
11 are compared with those published in the month immediately preceding
the attacks. The prevalence of both authoritarian and antiauthoritarian sentiments
expressed in published letters increased signiﬁcantly in the post-attack period,
suggesting that a signiﬁcant, national threat induces the authoritarian/antiauthoritarian
axis in American political culture.
Political Psychology, Vol. 26, No. 2, 2005
0162-895X © 2005 International Society of Political Psychology
Published by Blackwell Publishing. Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ
167
Authoritarianism, Antiauthoritarianism, and Political Culture
Responding to the horrors of the Holocaust and the abiding concern that mass
culture—and American culture in speciﬁc—lent itself to authoritarian tendencies
(Horkheimer & Adorno, 1969), The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, FrnkelBrunswik,
Levinson, & Sanford, 1950, hereafter tap) argued that there were
certain traits of individuals that made them likely to adopt authoritarian political
positions.1
Since tap most theories of authoritarianism have included the likelihood
that perception of threat increases authoritarian sentiment. Previous research
(e.g., Doty, Peterson, & Winder, 1991; Feldman & Stenner, 1997; Sales, 1972,
1973) has presented evidence for such a link, and new research by Lavine, Lodge,
& Freitas (2005) in this issue underscores this pathway with experimental
research.
Recently, Martin (2001) published a broad critique of the tradition of studies
of authoritarianism, arguing that tap inappropriately assigned authoritarian
“types” to individuals using nominalist measures. Essentially, Martin argues, the
authors assumed an authoritarian personality existed, then proceeded to locate and
even, when necessary, invent one. Research in authoritarianism, though, need not
be vulnerable to that charge. Whether authoritarianism is an individual trait or
(along the lines of Pettigrew, 1999) a set of cultural scripts (Alexander & Smith,
1993) invoked in different ways and at different times, its elements may be speciﬁed,
located, and discussed.
For the purposes of this paper, I think about authoritarianism more as form
than as content in order to guard against the political and epistemological biases
of which research following tap has been accused. That is, authoritarianism (as
trait or as cultural script) can be identiﬁed by the mode of argument and the tendency
to repress, censor, or punish others, not by the speciﬁc political positions
in which it argues for such actions (Altemeyer, 1996).
For analytical tools in a cultural understanding of authoritarianism, I turn to
cultural theory in sociology. Recent thinking in the sociology of culture has suggested
that culture is best understood as both strategic and discursive. Cultures
provide their participants with structures for interpreting and participating in
social life by deﬁning a set of rules, strategies, and resources available in social
settings (Swidler, 2001, 30). Contemporary frameworks for understanding
culture—among others, Swidler (1986), Bourdieu (1990), and Sewell (1992)—
share some important points. These authors see culture as providing a repertoire
of resources and guidelines, thereby at once enabling and constraining the available
choices of social action. Alexander and Smith (1993) have demonstrated that
168 Perrin
1
In other works, Adorno grew less committed to this individualist take. In Adorno (2000), he followed
Arendt (1953), analyzing the role available cultural messages play in building and sustaining
political authoritarianism. And in Adorno (1975) he speciﬁcally calls for a version of public opinion
research that understands publicity as an element of public opinion.
elements of political culture may occur in opposing pairs. In this context, that is,
events that evoke authoritarianism may also evoke antiauthoritarian positions.
Swidler (1986, 278–79) has suggested that “unsettled lives”—and, by extension,
unsettled times—are likely to see more explicit production of cultural strategies.
Marcus (2002), introducing the theory of affective intelligence, argues that
anxiety leads individuals to rational deliberation by forcing them to reëvaluate
habitual political behavior in the face of new concerns. But cultural production
and anxiety-provoked deliberation need not be oriented toward tolerance. Extant
theories of threat and authoritarianism, in fact, suggest that the threat of unsettled
times may send cultures retreating into an inward-focused authoritarian stance.
Lavine et al. (2005) suggest a two-stage process, in which individuals with authoritarian
tendencies retreat into political authoritarianism in the context of threatinduced
anxiety.
I build on this theoretical base to theorize that authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism
are elements of Americans’ political-cultural repertoire. That
means, to varying degrees and in varying circumstances, Americans may invoke
authoritarianism or antiauthoritarianism as ways of interpreting and responding
to events. The experience of a major national threat is likely to encourage the
expression of these elements. I use the case of a major, national-scale threat and
its empirical effect on political discourse to evaluate that hypothesis.
Approaching authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism as cultural elements
neither accepts nor contradicts the possibility of their being personal traits, as
social psychological accounts (e.g., Adorno et al., 1950; Oesterreich, 2005;
Stellmacher & Petzel, 2004) have suggested. One possible mechanism, for
example, is emotion: individuals who react to new information with anger may
adopt authoritarian stances, while those who react with anxiety may adopt antiauthoritarian
stances (Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000).2
Other individual-level
mechanisms are also plausible. This study aims to evaluate the impact of national
threat on culturally expressed authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism; it must
remain theoretically and empirically agnostic on the etiology of such expression.
The Threat and its Aftermath
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, are well known. A group of
19 hijackers took control of four transcontinental ﬂights—two from Boston’s
Logan International Airport, one from Newark International Airport, and one from
Washington’s Dulles International Airport—and crashed them into major sites.
The twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center were destroyed, and the Pentagon
was severely damaged. Media coverage—television, radio, print, and internet—of
the attacks was immediate and ubiquitous, insuring that essentially the
entire country was aware of the situation and its implications. This was the ﬁrst
National Threat and Political Culture 169
2
I am grateful to George Marcus for this insight.
foreign attack on U.S. soil in nearly 60 years. As portrayed in the media and perceived
by most citizens, it was national in scope, immediate (that is, conﬁned to
a speciﬁc time), and unpredictable. These factors made the level of perceived
threat in the U.S. population after September 11 signiﬁcantly greater than it had
been beforehand (Huddy, Khatib, & Capelos, 2002b, 420).
In the months following the attacks, there was much discussion of how the
events would affect American public opinion and political culture. The most
visible consideration of the political-cultural fallout of September 11 has been the
work of Robert Putnam (Putnam, 2002). Putnam claims that September 11 provided
the focus needed for a renewal of citizenship (Putnam, 2000, pp. 402–403).
Indeed, the events were so uniting that, Putnam claims, Americans became simultaneously
more community-minded, more patriotic, and more tolerant of ideological
and ethnic differences. In this view, September 11 was a catalyst allowing
Americans to resolve the sociological dualism, present at least since Tönnies
(1887) and Durkheim (1984/1893), by which community identiﬁcation and tolerance
of difference stand in opposition to one another. Extant theories of authoritarianism
predict the opposite: in the face of threat, authoritarian sentiment should
grow, either as authoritarian personalities are activated (Adorno et al., 1950) or
as authoritarian cultural tools become more attractive (Martin, 2001; Pettigrew,
1999; Swidler, 2001). There have been attempts to evaluate these predictions
using public-opinion polling data (see Huddy et al., 2002b), although conclusive
evaluations are not yet available.
A burgeoning medical literature has found substantial evidence of negative
psychological outcomes to the attacks. Schuster et al. found an extremely high
incidence of stress reactions; 90% of respondents to their survey reported one
or more “substantial symptoms of stress” (2001, p. 1509). Galea et al. (2002)
and Piotrokowski and Brannen (2002), similarly, found high occurrences of symptoms
of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following the
attacks. Schlenger et al. (2002) noted that these symptoms were signiﬁcantly more
likely to occur in residents of New York City than elsewhere, including the
Washington, D.C., area. Hoge and Pavlin (2002) used epidemiologic surveillance
techniques to detect signiﬁcantly higher rates of treatment for anxiety and
post-traumatic stress reactions among children, and for adjustment reactions
among adults.
Ford, Udry, Gleiter, and Chantala (2003) found evidence of “transient” psychological
symptoms and noted that the only long-lasting effect of exposure to
news of the attacks was signiﬁcantly higher levels of trust in government at all
levels (federal, state, and local).3
In a retrospective, longitudinal study, Silver,
Holman, McIntosh, Poulin, and Gil-Rivas (2002) conﬁrmed that psychological
symptoms declined over a six-month time period, but they remained elevated,
particularly among those who coped using “disengaging” strategies (giving up,
170 Perrin
3
I am currently working with the data used in Ford et al. (2003) to investigate that ﬁnding further.
denial, and self distraction). Noting the important theoretical difference between
personal and national threat, Huddy et al. (2002a) show that different kinds of
perceived threats in a sample of New York-area respondents evoke different protective
beliefs and responses.
Letters to the Editor as a Mediated Public Sphere
Published letters to the editor have rarely been used on a large scale as social
scientiﬁc data. There have been some small-scale studies of local letter-writers’
opinions on speciﬁc issues (Hill, 1981; Kinloch, 1997), but no study has sought
to consider the general tone or content of the Letters column over a speciﬁc period
of time. This is particularly surprising since letters to the editor are a perfect nonreactive
measure (Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, Sechrest, & Grove, 1981): they are
a documentary byproduct of everyday civic life and a forum in which citizens
choose to participate in a public sphere—albeit one that is constrained and mediated
(Hart, 2001; Page, 1996).
In the face of relatively rare and constrained opportunities for public deliberation
(Page, 1996), citizens may search for alternative modes of deliberation
that offer some form of communication. The newspaper—which has historically
been a technology of community identiﬁcation (Anderson, 1991; Schudson,
1995)—is an obvious place for them to turn. Other similar spaces may include
Internet chat rooms and radio and television call-in shows. These fora share the
characteristics of allowing nonelite citizens to participate in public discussion,
while signiﬁcantly limiting the content, style, and scope of that discussion. I term
these spaces mediated public spheres (see also Clayman, 2004) to point out the
opportunities and constraints they represent.
Very little recent research considers letters to the editor, either from the point
of view of journalistic practice or from that of public discourse. Hart (2001) found
that letter writers were signiﬁcantly older and more politically engaged than nonwriters
in their communities, but did not consider the relationship between letters’
content and the local public. Rosenau’s (1974) classic investigation of nonelectoral
political participation refers to it only in passing and combined with the practice
of writing letters to representatives. Early studies (e.g., Buell, 1975; Volgy,
Krigmaum, Langan, & Mosher, 1977) refuted the commonly held notion that
letter-writers were simply cranks and eccentrics, arguing instead that the forum
provided a space for serious political talk.
Other work has concentrated on the biases involved in selection of letters to
the editor. Renfro (1979), noting that editorial policies were a ﬁlter for which
letters saw their way into print, found that the ﬁlter introduced little actual bias
in a sample of letters received and published at one important newspaper. Grey
and Brown (1970) found that the gatekeeping function of editors signiﬁcantly
biased the contents of the letters published. In contrast, Sigelman and Walkosz
(1992) found that published letters to the editor reﬂected the general dimensions
National Threat and Political Culture 171
of public opinion surrounding the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday debate in
Arizona. From another perspective, Wahl-Jorgensen (2002) noted that editorial
staffs often consider letter-writers with contempt, speciﬁcally writing them off as
“insane.” I am currently in the midst of a project examining all letters received
by an important regional newspaper over a three-month period, which will allow
an evaluation of the characteristics that make a letter likely to be published by a
selective editor.4
While it is certainly true that gatekeepers structure the discourse found in the
letters to the editor,5
I contend that using published letters is an excellent way to
study political culture (as distinct from public opinion). Most editors say they try
to select letters that best represent the range of available views on an issue or that
represent the relative numbers of letters received on each side of a controversy
(Feyer, 2003; Robinson, 1976). Like other studies that use publicly available texts
as data for the study of culture (e.g., Sales, 1973; Wagner-Paciﬁci, 1994), this
study takes seriously the idea that culture is an interactive, discursive process
that cannot be measured simply by asking isolated individuals questions about
preferences (Eliasoph, 1998, p. 231). But where these studies have looked at
elite-produced texts (articles, television shows, cartoons, etc., all written by
professional authors), letters to the editor are a far more accessible medium for
“everyday” political discussion. This, then, is an investigation into authoritarian
and antiauthoritarian expression in political culture, not into public opinion.6
Letters to the editor often refer to previously occurring articles in the same
newspaper; with some frequency, they refer to other letters. Indeed, editorial page
editors consider a reference to an item in the paper a sine qua non for publication,
although that rule is often relaxed. The rhetoric is often both subtle and
well crafted. For example, consider the following letter, which appeared in the
Chattanooga Times/Free Press on September 23:
Watching the carnage in New York, I can’t in my mind understand how
a group of people can have such rage against the United States, let alone
the people. It brings to mind another time in the 1940s when another land
sneaked up on our back and caused great harm and damage. Then we
were brought out of our isolation into the 20th century. This act of barbarism
has no place in a civilized world. This act has stolen the innocents
[sic] from this country, and its people will never again be what we
were on Sept. 10. Now we will have to live in a much more brutal world
172 Perrin
4
Smaller, community papers like those studied in Hart (2001) tend to publish over 90% of the letters
they receive, making the gatekeeper function nearly irrelevant. Most medium- and large-size dailies,
though, are more selective.
5
A symposium in 1976 (Robinson, 1976) discussed how these gatekeepers understood their task; there
have been no published studies since then.
6
See Adorno (1975) for more on this distinction.
with people that have no regard for life. We will also need to place a
great deal of faith in God, for He will see us through.7
This letter illustrates several features of letters-to-the-editor discourse. The writer
draws an implicit comparison—in this case, with Pearl Harbor—to build a case
for the historical signiﬁcance of the September 11 attacks. The letter is rich in
metaphor, conceptualizing the nation as an “innocent” body (“sneaked up on our
back . . .”) at the same time as a country in need of modernization.
Comparison, as it turns out, is a common rhetorical tool in letters to the editor.
Writers frequently seek to compare current issues with “settled” concerns from
the past. Pearl Harbor, as well as the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building,
were the two most common comparisons in these letters. Schildkraut (2002)
makes the very important point that such comparisons still require substantial
interpretation; she notes that the policy prescriptions coming out of Pearl Harbor
and the September 11 attacks were signiﬁcantly different, even as policy makers
explicitly invoked the comparison in the service of their positions.
Because of the ways writers conceptualize writing letters to the editor, as well
as the structure of the column itself, we can consider letters to the editor a type
of mediated public sphere (Clayman, 2004): a metaphorical “space” in which
citizens can “enact efﬁcacious citizenship” (Jepperson and Swidler, 1994). As
Hart (2001, pp. 409–410) points out, they constitute a rich, largely untapped
source of citizen discourse. As Warren (2001) has suggested, these sorts of
spaces—letters to the editor along with Internet chat systems and radio and television
call-in shows—offer certain important elements of political deliberation.
However, they also constrain the boundaries of that deliberation in signiﬁcant and
often unobservable ways.
Hypotheses
Previous works on authoritarianism and threat lead to two speciﬁc hypotheses,
which I test in this paper. First, since perception of threat is a crucial part of
the theory of authoritarianism:
Hypothesis 1: Expressed authoritarian sentiment will be greater in times of generally
perceived threat than in settled times.
National Threat and Political Culture 173
7
This letter was assigned the following codes:
Codes
Proauthoritarian Antiauthoritarian
Projectivity Destructiveness & Cynicism
Superstition & Stereotypy
Second, for several theoretical reasons, an increase in one political stance is
likely related, in some manner, to an increase in an opposing political stance.
Therefore:
Hypothesis 2: Expressed antiauthoritarian sentiment will be greater in times of
generally perceived threat than in settled times.
Data
To investigate these hypotheses, I use an unusual data source: a large sample
of letters to the editor published in 17 U.S. daily newspapers during the one month
immediately prior to, and the one month immediately following, the September
11 attacks.8
I obtained the letters from the Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe database,
which contains historic, full-text articles from a large number of major media
outlets. I selected the 17 papers (see Table 1) to gain a geographic distribution
around the country as well as a mix of major urban centers, smaller cities, and
rural areas. In general, the papers selected were the most widely read newspapers
in their local markets (Standard Rate & Data Service, 2000). The two exceptions
to this rule are Long Island Newsday, whose New York metropolitan area market
makes it an unusual case; and the Tampa Tribune, which is eclipsed by crosscounty
rival the St. Petersburg Times. These papers were selected because an electronic
source for letters to the editor published in their rivals was unavailable, and
they had substantial enough readerships to justify seeing them as community institutions.
Finally, since many newspapers do not reliably include letters to the editor
in their Lexis-Nexis editions, I selected papers for which I could obtain letters for
nearly all dates of interest.
After collecting the original sample, I wrote a computer program to separate
individual letters out of the collected columns in which they were published. I
then obtained letters that were not available on Lexis-Nexis from the newspapers’
online archives. A few editions (17 of 1,037 paper-date pairs, or 1.6%) were
unavailable both from the newspapers’ websites and from Lexis-Nexis, but the
resulting dataset contains virtually every (98.4%) letter to the editor published in
the main editorial section.9
Table 2 shows the number of letters for each paper.
174 Perrin
8
I also collected letters published in the one-month period one year prior to the post-September 11
period (September 13—October 12, 2000), but this group will not be used for this analysis, since
the other two groups provide a more direct comparison based on other factors of the national mood
in the time around September 11.
9
Letters published in auxiliary sections (Sports, Entertainment, etc.) were not included.
NationalThreatandPoliticalCulture175
Table 1. Source Newspapers
Paper Location Regional Population Recipients (Households) 2000 Market Penetration
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Little Rock, ar 560,700 90,031 42%
Atlanta Journal and Constitution Atlanta, ga 3,807,900 372,510 26%
Austin American-Statesman Austin, tx 1,110,300 167,553 39%
Boston Globe Boston, ma 5,880,400 433,429 20%
Chattanooga Times/Free Press Chattanooga, tn 451,900 68,239 39%
Dayton Daily News Dayton, oh 949,000 134,784 37%
Denver Rocky Mountain News Denver, co 2,412,500 308,979 32%
Kansas City Star Kansas City, mo 1,741,900 249,243 37%
Minnesota Star-Tribune Minneapolis, mn 2,843,100 329,454 31%
Newsday Long Island, ny 18,481,600 563,807 8%
San Diego Union-Tribune San Diego, ca 2,860,500 372,267 38%
San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco, ca 7,079,100 541,703 21%
St Louis Post-Dispatch St Louis, mo 2,573,800 286,546 29%
State Journal-Register Springﬁeld, il 199,400 49,354 61%
Tampa Tribune Tampa, ﬂ 2,299,900 198,942 21%
The Hartford Courant Hartford, ct 1,115,700 186,434 44%
Wilmington Morning Star-News Wilmington, nc 221,000 42,920 48%
Source: Standard Rate & Data Service (2000).
Coding
I coded a sample of 1,100 letters: 544 published during the pre-September
11 period and 556 published after September 11. Within each time period, the
sample was drawn randomly by the computer. The program presented each letter
without any context (date, newspaper, author, etc.), although in many cases one
or more of these elements was obvious from the text. Table 2 summarizes the
letters that were coded. The letters were coded using a simple scheme, based on
the F scale (Adorno et al., 1950, pp. 248–250):
Conventionalism: Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.
Authoritarian Submission: Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized
moral authorities of the ingroup.
Authoritarian Aggression: Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn,
reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.
Anti-intraception: Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-
minded.
176 Perrin
Table 2. Letters by Paper and Time Period
Paper 8/10-9/10/01 9/13-10/13/01 Total
Total Coded Total Coded Total Coded
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 213 34 222 35 435 69
Atlanta Journal and Constitution 126 17 139 11 265 29
Austin American-Statesman 130 11 105 21 235 31
Boston Globe 221 34 280 36 501 70
Chattanooga Times/Free Press 200 21 283 43 483 65
Dayton Daily News 311 51 157 25 468 76
Denver Rocky Mountain News 280 39 329 47 609 86
Kansas City Star 384 48 369 35 753 83
Minnesota Star-Tribune 226 28 282 35 508 63
Newsday 165 18 354 49 519 67
San Diego Union-Tribune 183 22 125 15 308 37
San Francisco Chronicle 361 64 317 31 678 95
St Louis Post-Dispatch 230 30 334 44 564 74
State Journal-Register 207 24 242 31 449 55
Tampa Tribune 235 40 297 46 532 86
The Hartford Courant 276 48 271 34 547 82
Wilmington Morning Star-News 92 15 155 18 247 33
Total 3,840 544 4,261 556 8,101 1,100
Superstition and Stereotypy: The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s
fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.
Power and “Toughness”: Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strongweak,
leader-follower dimension; identiﬁcation with power ﬁgures; overemphasis
upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion
of strength and toughness.
Destructiveness and Cynicism: Generalized hostility, viliﬁcation of the human.
Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in
the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.
Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual “goings-on.”
On each of these elements, a letter was coded 1, 0, or -1. A “1” indicates speciﬁc
support for the corresponding theme of authoritarianism; a “-1” indicates a position
speciﬁcally against the theme, although it need not address a speciﬁc instance
of that theme; and a “0” indicates no discernible position on an element.
Out of the letters’ codes, I calculated four aggregate measures for use in evaluating
the general authoritarian and antiauthoritarian character of letters:
Authoritarian Sum: The sum of all nine scores; as a simple sum, antiauthoritarian
scores on some elements cancel out authoritarian scores on other
elements.
Proauthoritarian Sum: The sum of all positive scores, ignoring negative scores.
This is a measure of the degree of authoritarianism present in a letter, regardless
of any countervailing degree of antiauthoritarianism.
Antiauthoritarian Sum: The sum of the absolute values of all negative
scores, ignoring positive scores. This is a measure of the degree of antiauthoritarianism
present in a letter, regardless of any countervailing degree
of pro-authoritarianism.
Authoritarian Intensity: The sum of the absolute scores of the nine elements.
This is a measure of the prevalence of the issue of authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism
in a letter.
To incorporate the concerns raised in Altemeyer (1981), I also calculated the
equivalent measures for RWA. For those calculations, scores for authoritarian submission,
authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism were combined into sum,
pro, anti, and intensity scores:
National Threat and Political Culture 177
RWA Sum: The sum of the three RWA-relevant scores (authoritarian aggression,
authoritarian submission, and conventionalism).
RWA Proauthoritarian Sum: The sum of all positive RWA-relevant scores.
RWA Antiauthoritarian Sum: The sum of the absolute values of all negative
RWA-relevant scores.
RWA Intensity: The sum of the absolute scores of the three RWA-relevant
elements.
This process should be understood more as “expert coding” (Krippendorff,
1980) than as classical content-analytic coding, since it requires an understanding
of the concepts of authoritarianism and a judgment about the existence of a
latent trait (Neuendorf, 2002, pp. 23–25; 99). Nevertheless, as recommended in
Evans (1996), a second coder was trained in the technique and coded a randomly
selected subset of roughly 25% (N = 273) of the sample. Cohen’s k scores (Cohen,
1960) ranged from 57% for authoritarian submission to 86% for sex, with a mean
of 71%. Inter coder correlations for composite scales ranged from 79% for authoritarian
intensity to 83% for authoritarian sum. Table 3 shows the agreement scores.
178 Perrin
Table 3. Interrater agreement
Variable Statistic Value
Individual Ratings:
Authoritarian Aggression Cohen’s k 0.680
Anti-Intraception Cohen’s k 0.721
Conventionalism Cohen’s k 0.664
Cynicism Cohen’s k 0.768
Projectivity Cohen’s k 0.715
Power and “Toughness” Cohen’s k 0.777
Sex Cohen’s k 0.855
Superstition and Stereotypy Cohen’s k 0.653
Authoritarian Submission Cohen’s k 0.572
Mean 0.712
Composite Scales:
Authoritarian Sum Correlation 0.832
Proauthoritarian Sum Correlation 0.810
Antiauthoritarian Sum Correlation 0.821
Authoritarian Intensity Correlation 0.788
RWA Sum Correlation 0.734
RWA Proauthoritarian Sum Correlation 0.695
RWA Antiauthoritarian Sum Correlation 0.762
RWA Intensity Correlation 0.721
Mean 0.770
N = 273.
Although there are no generally accepted guidelines for sufﬁcient inter rater reliability,
these scores are high enough to insure that the ﬁndings are not simply the
result of individual coder bias.
Authoritarian and Antiauthoritarian Letters
As examples of the rhetorical strategy and ideological breadth of the letters,
as well as of the coding process, I offer several examples.
Paper: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Date: Sept. 27, 2001
We are all Americans, people in this country. The idiot who wrote in
saying that George W. Bush started this war should be horsewhipped.
His letter was an insult to all the victims, rescue workers and just plain
loyal Americans. As for the so-called university crowd, I remember a
time when they would be tried for treason. Bush said it best: If you’re
not for us, you’re for the terrorists.
Codes
Proauthoritarian Antiauthoritarian
Aggression
Anti-Intraception
Superstition and Stereotypy
Power and Toughness
The authoritarian character of this letter is clear. Aggression and preoccupation
with power and toughness are central to the message (“horsewhipped” and “tried
for treason”). Furthermore, the anti-intraception theme is also strong, with its
rejection of the “university crowd.” The “uncritical conformity with the prevailing
group ways” (Adorno et al., 1950, pp. 107, 249) in the letter (“If you’re not
for us, you’re for the terrorists.” See also Oesterreich (2005), this issue) qualiﬁes
it for superstition and stereotypy as well.
Paper: State Journal-Register; Date: Aug. 14, 2001
. . . To describe Chris Britt’s cartoons as “communist propaganda”
smacks of pure ignorance on [the prior letter-writer]’s part. Instead I
would gather that like many people brainwashed in today’s society [the
prior letter-writer] automatically labels anything he disagrees with as
being communist or anti-American. . . .
I wonder which is more dangerous to American society—a cartoonist
whose job it is to poke fun at politics and make us think about social
National Threat and Political Culture 179
issues, or a person who would take away the cartoonist’s right to say
what he wants. No, it is not Chris Britt who should live in Beijing. It is
[the prior letter-writer] who should go back in time and live in Germany
in 1938. It is to that country and that time where closed-minded individuals
like [the prior letter-writer] belong. Remember: Never underestimate
the danger of ignorant people in large groups.
Codes
Proauthoritarian Antiauthoritarian
Authoritarian Submission
Aggression
Anti-Intraception
Superstition and Stereotypy
In order to be antiauthoritarian, a letter must explicitly argue against authoritarian
themes. This letter reacts to a previous letter calling for a cartoonist’s deportation.
It argues against submission (criticizing “many people brainwashed in
today’s society”), aggression (“. . . right to say what he wants”), anti-intraception
(by repeatedly denigrating “ignorance”), and superstition and stereotypy (by
accusing the prior letter writer of being “closed minded”).
Both this letter and the one to which it refers share a common element in
letters-to-the-editor discourse: hyperbole. Presumably, the original letter writer
did not actually expect Britt to be sent to Beijing, nor did this letter writer expect
the other to be sent to Nazi Germany. The relative inefﬁcacy of letter writers—
the fact that their deliberation is in its own space, separated from “elite” journalism
and discourse—contributes to this tendency to make grand comparisons and
large conclusions.10
Hybridity and Ambiguity
Many of the letters—12.3% (41, or 7.5%, before September 11, 95, or 17.1%,
after)—contained at least one element of proauthoritarianism and one element of
antiauthoritarianism.
For example, consider this letter, published in the Wilmington, North
Carolina, Morning Star-News on September 26, headlined “Do we care?”:
During the war in Europe, in every town we entered in Germany walls
were covered with slogans, in letters two feet high. Most frequent was
180 Perrin
10
Internet discussion groups (known as “usenet”) reduce the cost of hyperbole even further, leading
to what has become known as “Godwin’s Law”:
“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler
approaches one.” There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over,
and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.
(http://www.tuxedo.org/˜esr/jargon/html/entry/Godwin’s-Law.html)
Was hast Du heute für Deutschland getan? (What have you done today
for Germany?) I believe it appropriate for us in America. What have you
done for America today—or in the past?
Have you committed any random acts of kindness?
Do you remember, and practice, everything you learned in
kindergarten?
Do you set a good example for children around you? Do you salute
the ﬂag?
Do you display it?
Do you know the memorial “eternal ﬂame” in front of City Hall died
out more than 20 years ago and has become a receptacle for trash?
Do you care?
Do you know the U.S.O. Building on 2nd and Orange will not, has
not, done anything to serve today’s young Americans, far from home, in
local military installations—yet we expect them to risk their lives to
protect ours? Does anyone care?
Codes
Proauthoritarian Antiauthoritarian
Conventionalism Destructiveness & Cynicism
Authoritarian Submission
Superstition and Stereotypy
Projectivity
This letter calls explicitly for a return to community mindedness and does so in
the language of Nazi Germany: the very regime after which theories of authoritarianism
were modeled. Its argument against destructiveness and cynicism is
embodied in the earlier imperatives (“commit . . . acts of kindness,” “set a good
example for children”). Its conventionalism, though, sits in the connection established
between community service and patriotism, which also explains the letter’s
superstition and stereotypy and its conventionalism. Finally, the admonition that
“young Americans, far from home . . . risk their lives to protect ours” constitutes
projectivity.
A letter in the Austin American-Statesman on September 14 illustrates the
mixed response to aggression:
We should not repeat the hatred of a perceived enemy as we did with
Americans of other ancestry after World War II. An American is an
American. . . .
There is no room for a middle ground in this situation. . . .
We should not lash out at those whom we presume to be responsible,
we should eliminate all those who are responsible. We should be
patient; justice will be served.
National Threat and Political Culture 181
Codes
Proauthoritarian Antiauthoritarian
Authoritarian Submission Destructiveness & Cynicism
Authoritarian Aggression
Power and Toughness
Projectivity
The letter argues against destructiveness and cynicism by warning against “the
hatred of a perceived enemy.” But it advocates submission (“there is no middle
ground”) and aggression (“we should eliminate all those who are responsible”).
Its faith in power and toughness (“justice will be served”) is brought up by its
general projectivity: the world has become a more dangerous place.
This letter illustrates very well the dialectic between antiauthoritarian
restraint and power and toughness; the reason for the calmness and methodical
behavior the author calls for is the eventual victory of American interests.
Similarly, consider the following letter from the Chattanooga Times/Free
Press on September 23, which illustrates this same dialectical ambivalence
between generosity and hostility:
Show America why we’re Volunteer State
Let’s help our American brothers and sisters in New York and Washington in
ways that will show why we are called The Volunteer State—not just for something
that happened in the past, not because we support UT, but because of the
way we still answer the call for help and the call to action.
Let’s also support our president and military in ways that will show all
enemies and potential enemies that if they touch any member of our American
family they will have to ﬁght all of us.
Codes
Proauthoritarian Antiauthoritarian
Authoritarian Submission Destructiveness & Cynicism
Authoritarian Aggression
Power and Toughness
Projectivity
Once more, this letter argues against cynicism by calling for readers to “answer the
call for help.” Its submission, though, follows directly: “support our president and
military,” and aggression follows thereafter: “they will have to ﬁght all of us.”
Projectivity is implied in the letter’s response to the increased danger in the world.
Methods
Because of the strictly comparative nature of the data, I conceptualize this
investigation as an epidemiological comparison between a group of exposed
182 Perrin
subjects and a control group. The unit of analysis here, though, is the letter, not
the person who wrote it. Letters published after September 13, 2001, are considered
“exposed” to the September 11, 2001, attacks, and letters published on or
before September 10, 2001, are the control (unexposed) group. Most of the analyses,
therefore, are simply bivariate (c2
) considerations of the difference between
the two groups of letters.
It is, however, reasonable to think that other characteristics of letters may
inﬂuence their authoritarian and antiauthoritarian positions. Thus, after analyzing
the exposure-vs.-control data, I run a series of hierarchical linear regression
models (HLMs; Pinheiro & Bates, 2000; Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002) to take into
account two variables at the newspaper level:
Region, the U.S. Census region in which the letter was published, with New York
State separated into its own region because of the possible locality of effects
to New York City (Schlenger et al., 2002).11
The states from which letters
were drawn are in the following regions:
1 Northeast (ct, ma)
2 Midwest (oh, mo, mn, il)
3 South (ar, ga, tx, tn, ﬂ, nc)
4 West (co, ca)
5 New York State
Population, the population of the main market for the newspaper in which the
letter was published. This measure is intended as a proxy for the urban character
of the community.
These models predict continuous outcomes (the composite scores), so are estimated
as random-effects linear models with letters nested within newspapers.
Because the letters were collected from published records, there is no reliable
method for inferring characteristics such as age, race, sex, education, income,
emotional state, or marital status of the letter writers.
In order to determine whether authoritarian content changed as the time since
the attacks grew, I also ran HLMs testing for the effect of the date of publication
on pro- and antiauthoritarian sentiments for letters published in the exposure
group. However, since none of these models showed any signiﬁcant effect, I do
not present further analyses of them in this paper.
National Threat and Political Culture 183
11
The same models run with New York incorporated into the northeast region showed no substantial
difference in results.
Results
The results show a strong and consistent increase in authoritarianism, antiauthoritarianism,
and authoritarian intensity using both the Adorno et al. (1950)
and the RWA Altemeyer (1981) criteria.
Bivariate Analysis
The mean values of seven of the eight measures increased signiﬁcantly after
the September 11 attacks (Table 4). The exception is the RWA measure of antiauthoritarianism,
which increased only slightly, and statistically insigniﬁcantly.
The largest overall change is in the authoritarian intensity: the salience of questions
of authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism grew in the wake of the attacks.
The increase in proauthoritarianism is substantial and signiﬁcant, while the
increase in antiauthoritarianism is smaller but still signiﬁcant. There is a very substantial,
signiﬁcant difference in the degree of pro- and antiauthoritarianism
present in letters published before and after the September 11 attacks, as shown
by the large change in mean authoritarian intensity.
The changes in the more restricted RWA measures are all in the same
direction as those in the broader measures,12
although the increase in antiauthoritarianism
measured on the RWA scale is much smaller and insigniﬁcant.
The reasons for the difference between the full and RWA scales can be found
by examining the individual measures (data are presented in Table A1). The three
measures included in the RWA scale increased quite substantially; at the same
184 Perrin
Table 4. Mean Authoritarian/Antiauthoritarian Measures
Measure Control Exposure D c2
p
Authoritarian Sum 0.033 0.326 +0.293 81.23 <.001
Proauthoritarian Sum 0.597 1.257 +0.660 64.66 <.001
Antiauthoritarian Sum 0.564 0.932 +0.368 26.09 .001
Authoritarian Intensity 1.162 2.189 +1.027 101.98 <.001
RWA Sum 0.000 0.236 +0.236 55.01 <.001
RWA Proauthoritarian Sum 0.217 0.516 +0.299 51.07 <.001
RWA Antiauthoritarian Sum 0.217 0.281 +0.064 3.72 .2933
RWA Intensity 0.434 0.797 +0.363 51.65 <.001
N = 1,100
12
Note that the increases (D) are not relative to the boundaries of the scale.
time, ﬁve of the remaining six on the full scale either decreased (three measures)
or increased relatively little (two). Only projectivity—which showed the single
largest increase of all the measures—outpaced the RWA measures in the magnitude
of its increase during the exposure period.
Regression Analysis
The results of the regression analysis (Table 5) provide additional support
for the claim that the principal explanation for variation in pro- and antiauthoritarianism
is exposure to the attacks of September 11.
Table 5 shows coefﬁcients, signiﬁcances, and intraclass correlations (ICC, or
r) for the hierarchical linear models predicting authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism
in the letters to the editor. Each column represents one distinct
model with a speciﬁc dependent variable: the same variables described above for
the bivariate analysis. The rows represent independent variables. The ICC (r) can
be interpreted as the proportion of the unexplained variance in the model that is
attributable to the second-level grouping (in this case, the newspaper) as opposed
to the ﬁrst-level unit of analysis (in this case, the letter; Raudenbush & Bryk,
2002, p. 24).
In every case, the strongest predictor of pro- and antiauthoritarian sentiment
is exposure to the September 11 attacks—letters in the “exposure” period are signiﬁcantly
more proauthoritarian, signiﬁcantly more antiauthoritarian, and signiﬁcantly
more likely to address questions of authoritarianism than are those
published in the “control” period. Perhaps reﬂecting the relatively conservative
culture of the south (Luebke, 1998), letters appearing in southern newspapers were
signiﬁcantly more proauthoritarian and signiﬁcantly more likely to address questions
of authoritarianism than those published in the northeast (the reference
region), even after controlling for exposure to September 11.
The south is joined by the midwest and the west (for the Adorno et al. measures)
and by only the west (for the RWA measures) in its increased authoritarian
intensity. This is particularly interesting since the northeast and New York—sites
of three of the four attacks and three of the four points of departure for the hijacked
aircraft—displayed signiﬁcantly lower amounts of discussion over questions of
authoritarianism. Finally, the west showed signiﬁcantly greater levels of antiauthoritarianism
on the RWA scale than did the rest of the country.
There is no signiﬁcant difference in any measure of pro- or antiauthoritarianism
based on the population of the area in which letters were published. Large,
urban areas, that is, are no more or less likely to be the home to a pro- or antiauthoritarian
letter. Also, the ICCs are extremely low—ranging from 0 to 0.8%—
suggesting that little of the remaining difference in pro- and antiauthoritarianism
in the letters is due to unexamined differences in the newspapers in which they
were published.
National Threat and Political Culture 185
186Perrin
Table 5. Hierarchical Linear Model Regression Results
F (Adorno et al., 1950) RWA (Altemeyer, 1981)
Authoritarian Proauth Antiauth Authoritarian Authoritarian Proauth Antiauth Authoritar
Sum Sum Sum Valence Sum Sum Sum Valence
Exposure group .272* .645*** .370*** 1.006*** .216*** .289*** .071* .359***
Region:
Midwest .004 .188 .184 .368* -.092 .022 .110 .133
South .482 .589** .113 .695** .185 .260* .070 .327**
West .117 .283 .172 .452* -.026 .121 .151* .264*
New York .178 .080 -.079 .094 .348 .112 -.197 -.090
Population .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000
Intercept -.098 .278 .381 .684 .055 .117 .072 .188
ICC (r) .004 .008 .000 .000 .000 .004 .000 .006
N = 1,100 letters nested in 17 newspapers. ***p < .001; **p < .01; *p < .05.
Discussion
As expected, the degree of authoritarian sentiment expressed in the nation’s
letters to the editor columns rose substantially in the wake of a generally perceived
major threat. The overall authoritarian sentiment rose signiﬁcantly after
the September 11 attacks.
However, perhaps more interesting than the rise in authoritarianism is the rise
in general questions of authoritarianism versus antiauthoritarianism. Separated
from antiauthoritarianism, authoritarian sentiment rose very signiﬁcantly after
the attacks; however, antiauthoritarianism also rose, albeit less dramatically.
And the authoritarian intensity—the salience of authoritarianism regardless of
direction—rose most dramatically of the four measures.
Authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism, it seems, are tied to one another
in some way. There are two competing theories as to why antiauthoritarianism
might rise along with authoritarianism in the wake of a major threat. One
possibility is that antiauthoritarianism reacts to rising authoritarianism, as in
Figure 1. However, the fact that many individual letters contained pro- and
antiauthoritarian elements suggests that antiauthoritarianism was not a simple
reaction to authoritarianism.
Alternatively, as suggested by neo-structuralist approaches to political culture
(e.g., Alexander & Smith, 1993), the authoritarianism/antiauthoritarianism
duality could be one of the “intertwining sets of binary relations” (Alexander &
Smith, 1993, p. 157) that form the backbone of political culture. That is, instead
of antiauthoritarianism being a reaction to authoritarianism (or, conceivably, the
reverse), the two could be opposite expressions of a single element of political
culture, as in Figure 2.
There is no way to test these two explanations using these data. Since letters
are selected for their relevance to prior items in a given newspaper, those published
will likely be biased toward reactive claims, so analyzing the letters themselves
raises substantial methodological concerns.
Within the exposure group, the date of publication is not a signiﬁcant predictor
of any measure of pro- or antiauthoritarianism. That ﬁnding suggests
that the intriguing possibility of a single authoritarianism/antiauthoritarianism
axis might be correct. But dates of publication are a very coarse measure, since
letters may be held for an indeterminate amount of time between receipt and
National Threat and Political Culture 187
Threat Authoritarianism
Anti−
authoritarianism
Figure 1. Linear conception of authoritarianism/antiauthoritarianism link.
publication. Furthermore, letter writers are presumably reacting to a host of
stimuli, many of which cannot be found in prior letters.
The fact that many of the letters had both pro- and antiauthoritarian elements
suggests that at least part of the effect is structural; letters cannot be reacting to
their own authoritarianism if the reaction is within the same text. Besides offering
support to the neo-structural view of cultural repertoires—that cultural elements
appear in opposing pairs—this ﬁnding supports the idea that community
altruism and authoritarian exclusion may, themselves, be dialectically related.13
It
also suggests that the cultural creativity associated with unsettled times may
encourage reconﬁguring pro- and antiauthoritarianism; threatened publics may
generate new ways of reacting to events rather than only invoking existing ones.
Inferring psychological motivations for letter writers based on their published
letters is theoretically problematic. It is possible that individual writers’ attitudes
became more pro- and antiauthoritarian in the wake of the attacks. Das, de Wit,
and Stroebe (2003) and Huddy et al. (2002a) provide two possible psychological
mechanisms for understanding the connection between threat and increases in
both pro- and antiauthoritarianism. Huddy et al. (2002a) note that different individuals
may experience the threat differently: some as personal threat (e.g., fears
for safety) and others as national threat (concerns about implications for the
country). These differing interpretations may explain differences in individual
political reactions. Substituting emotional reactions for interpretations, a similar
mechanism is suggested by Marcus (2002); Marcus et al. (2000). Also, Das et al.
(2003) show that patients’ experience of threat and sense of vulnerability predispose
them to accept persuasive messages from medical personnel. Transferring
that ﬁnding to the political realm, individuals may be more susceptible to prescriptive
messages from authority ﬁgures when they are received under the condition
of heightened perceived threat.
188 Perrin
Authoritarianism
Threat
authoritarianism
Anti−
Figure 2. Bidirectional conception of authoritarianism/antiauthoritarianism link.
13
This is, of course, not a new insight—see, e.g., Coser (1984).
It is equally plausible, though, that individuals felt more comfortable expressing
pro- and antiauthoritarian views in the changed civic context of the post-attack
United States (see Eliasoph, 1998), or that they considered it more pressing to do
so. Even measuring the emotional character of letters14
is problematic, since the
debate format and the tendency toward hyperbole of letters to the editor makes it
impossible to determine the extent to which the emotional tone is a function of
the writer’s disposition as opposed to a rhetorical strategy.
Conclusion
Faced with an unexpected, immediate, national threat, American political
culture responded by increasing its attention to authoritarianism. The speciﬁc
form this attention took—proauthoritarian, antiauthoritarian, or “hybrid”—was
varied, as positions for and against authoritarian elements became part of the
discussion. There are several possible causes for the variation in approaches to
authoritarianism; emotion (Marcus, 2002), cognition (DiMaggio, 1997), and discourse
(Wilson, 2003) are three promising candidates.
To what extent do the “silver lining” arguments of Putnam and others reﬂect
changes in political culture after the September 11, 2001, attacks? Plainly,
American discourse did not simply become more tolerant in the wake of the
attacks. Rather, these unsettled times became a moment for cultural production,
as Americans negotiated the twin attractions of pro- and antiauthoritarianism.
Political discourse became signiﬁcantly more aggressive in punishing perceived
enemies and more concerned with power and toughness. At the same time, though,
discourse became appreciably less cynical. And in the face of generally increasing
intolerance, there was also a signiﬁcant rise in tolerance.
Since Putnam and others measured public opinion, not public discourse, there
is no fundamental conﬂict between the two sets of ﬁndings. It is possible that
Americans became generally more tolerant in their private beliefs, but that intolerant
beliefs became more prevalent in public discourse. It is also possible that
social desirability bias induced survey respondents to give unrealistically tolerant
answers to questions.
The cultural effects of September 11 are far from straightforward. American
political culture’s greater mistrust for outsiders may be part and parcel of its
growing sense of community in the wake of a national threat. Clearly, though, the
attacks and their aftermath had profound implications for the presence of authoritarianism
and antiauthoritarianism in American political discourse. Given the
frequency of “hybrid” letters, further research should examine the relationship
between these two poles.
This research underscores and advances our knowledge in several ways. First,
it conﬁrms existing theories that link authoritarian attitudes with the experience
National Threat and Political Culture 189
14
As one reviewer of this paper suggested.
of a threat. Unlike prior studies showing such a link, though, the threat in this
case is national, immediate, and unpredictable, and therefore more like the kind
of threat anticipated in tap and other theories of authoritarianism.
Second, the ﬁndings provide substantive empirical evidence for a discursive
tie between pro- and antiauthoritarianism. The data are inadequate for assessing
the content and directionality of that tie; those remain important questions for
future research.
The mechanism explaining these effects remains an important question for
future research. It is possible, as tap claimed, that authoritarianism is a direct
result of the experience of threat. Alternatively, it is possible that emotions, personality
traits (e.g., the tendency to respond with anger as opposed to anxiety),
and cultural factors mediate the threat-authoritarianism link.
Finally, the article illustrates the utility of published letters to the editor as
data for exploring the boundaries of political discourse. By using a large sample
of letters from a wide distribution of newspapers, we can “sample” discourse that
is generated by, and available to, ordinary citizens who choose to participate in a
particular kind of mediated public sphere. Understanding exactly who is likely to
participate in that forum and how they intervene in the discussion is also fertile
ground for future inquiry.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I gratefully acknowledge comments and advice from George Marcus, Felicia
Mebane, Eliana Perrin, Robin Wagner-Paciﬁci, Wendy Wolford, three anonymous
reviewers, and participants in the panel on Interpretive Cultural Sociology at the
2002 ASA annual meeting. Sondra Smolek provided invaluable research assistance
with the study. María Jiménez-Kuykendall and Penelope Lazarou were particularly
diligent in the process of building the letters database. All remaining
errors are, of course, my own.
Correspondence may be addressed to Andrew J. Perrin (Department of Sociology,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, CB#3210, Hamilton Hall,
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210). E-mail: andrew_perrin@unc.edu
APPENDIX
Table A1 presents control/exposure differences in the nine individual elements
of the authoritarianism scale. This allows for examining differences in parts
of expressed authoritarian and antiauthoritarian sentiment. Most of the elements
are, in themselves, statistically signiﬁcantly increased in the exposure period. The
exceptions are three of the six elements in the full scale but not in the RWA scale,
each of which decreased at some degree of statistical signiﬁcance: destructiveness
and cynicism; anti-intraception; and sex.
190 Perrin
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Table A1. Pro-/Antiauthoritarian Changes: Component Codes
Code Control Exposure D c2
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Included in RWA and full scales:
Conventionalism .040 .110 +.070 18.093 <.001
Authoritarian Submission -.085 .032 +.117 46.51 <.001
Authoritarian Aggression .044 .094 +.050 40.79 <.001
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