Political Conservatism

Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition

Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism:

• death anxiety (weighted mean r = .50);
• system instability (.47);
• dogmatism intolerance of ambiguity (.34);
• openness to experience (.32);
• uncertainty tolerance (.27);
• needs for order, structure, and closure (.26);
• integrative complexity (.20);
• fear of threat and loss (.18);
• self-esteem (.09).

The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat.

American Psychological Association, Psychological Bulletin
2003, Vol. 129, No. 3, 339–375 PDF HTML

"Paranoia is not an obscure mental state afflicting some individuals but a widespread condition of modern societies...the paranoid dynamic has been aggressively present in every social disaster of this century"—Political Paranoia, The Psychopolitics of Hatred

• The American Political Psyche and the Culture of Paranoia
• The Paranoid Style in American Politics
• The rational thinker versus the paranoid
• The Hour of the Beast