Authoritarianism, Political Attitudes, and Vote Choice:A Longitudinal Analysis of the British Electorate

The nature, measurement, and correlates of the psychological trait of authoritarianism have spurred an intense and long-lasting debate in political psychology, dating back to the 1950s. This article aims at advancing extant knowledge on authoritarianism—measured here by child-rearing items—in two ways. First, by investigating the impact of authoritarianism on political attitudes and voting, net of individual heterogeneity, thus improving causal estimation. Second, by investigating the extent to which there exists reverse causality between authoritarianism and political attitudes. To do so, we employ a longitudinal analysis that covers a timespan of two years using the 2021 British Election Study Panel. The results suggest that authoritarianism in Britain is positively associated with anti-immigration attitudes, anti-EU preferences, and opposition to economic redistribution. However, when accounting for potential confounding through the inclusion of individual fixed effects, we find that authoritarianism retains its significant association with anti-immigration preferences alone. Further, lagged relations between authoritarianism and immigration preferences indicate that within-person changes in immigration attitudes precede changes in authoritarianism—not the other way around. Finally, the findings indicate that authoritarianism’s correlation with vote choice is a product of omitted variable bias rather than representing a causal relationship.