View article

In this article we examine the findings of three studies of right-wing authoritarianism conducted in South Africa. The main aim of the article is to report on the validity and reliability of measures of right-wing authoritarianism across three samples, namely a group of police officers, a group of students at a historically English university and a group of students at a historically Afrikaans university. Two measures of authoritarianism were used: the 30-item version of Altemeyer's (1981, 1988) Right-wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale and the 14-item version of Altemeyer's RWA scale developed by Duckitt (1993a) for use in South African samples. Participants were also given measures of conservatism, prejudice and political beliefs. These scales were then subjected to analyses of internal consistency, factor analysis and correlational analysis. The findings depart somewhat from previous studies in this area in that they do not …