Constructing a Four-Item Left-Wing Authoritarianism Scale

Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA) is an increasingly popular psychological construct, and yet to date the shortest general questionnaire available to measure it is thirteen items. In the present project, we develop a four-item LWA scale that is available for free academic use. We evaluated items for the scale using two broad criteria: (1) Item-level ratings of authoritarian content and (2) expected validity relationships. The final four-item LWA-Short scale showed excellent properties across eight samples (total n = 4240): The scale showed good internal reliability (average alpha = .83), correlated highly with both Conway et al.’s LWA scale (r = .78) and Costello et al’s LWA scale (r = .78), negatively correlated with political conservatism (r = -.37), and showed similar effects to the full LWA scale across eleven additional validity criteria (average full LWA scale effect size = .42; average short-form LWA effect size = .39). We further show that a parallel four-item RWA scale using the same base items performs well in validity tests. In summary, not only do participants rate our new four-item LWA scale as measuring authoritarianism, the new short scale has good internal reliability, good validity, a readily-available parallel RWA scale, and is highly correlated with (and shows similar effects to) both of the major LWA measures currently available. Thus, for researchers interested in measuring LWA but who do not have space in their research projects for a longer scale, the LWA-short scale is a viable alternative.