ABSTRACT
Ever since its original conception, authoritarianism is claimed to be the driving force behind various forms of anti-modern attitudes and politics. While current research mainly focuses on three dimensions of right-wing authoritarianism, namely authoritarian aggression, authoritarian submission, and conventionalism, the original F-scale was more extensive, including conspiracy mentality and superstition among others. Based on recent empirical observations as well as theoretical claims, this chapter suggests revisiting these concepts. Using a German representative sample (N = 2,522), notable differences between East and West Germany for all five subdimensions were observed in 2022. Multilevel analyses were used to identify and disentangle individual factors as well as sociostructural context factors, which may be responsible for these differences and codetermine the prevalence of the dimensions of authoritarian attitudes. Our analyses reveal that significant regional differences, which go beyond mere East–West differences in authoritarian attitudes in Germany, can partly be explained by the selected context variables. Moreover, collective experiences of deprivation interact with average household income on the district level, and this interaction helps predict authoritarian aggression and submission as well as conspiracy mentality. Nevertheless, individual variables explain more variance overall than contextual variables, particularly in the case of conspiracy mentality and superstition.
