ABSTRACT
The meta-analytic review indicated that stronger feelings of the threat, death anxiety, and exposure to system threat were positively associated with conservatism. For all political variables, higher values reflect greater conservatism and lower values reflect greater liberalism. In addition, conservatism was negatively associated with uncertainty tolerance, integrative complexity, and need for cognition. The endorsement of conservative ideology is also positively associated with various forms of existential motivation – including subjective perceptions of danger and threat, and objective exposure to threatening circumstances such as terrorist attacks. Since 2003, the theory of political conservatism as motivated social cognition has received a great deal of corroborating evidence. However, the theory of political conservatism as motivated social cognition would suggest that needs to reduce uncertainty and threat would predict rightist rather than leftist orientation once the transition to a democratic, capitalist system was established.
