Are there unconscious psychological factors that contribute to political extremism?

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the possibility of common unconscious factors that underpin an individual’s identification with political extremism. The issue of common psychological tendencies that have been observed to be prevalent in political extremism will be addressed first to determine how sound this claim is as of existing theories, then I will move on to discussions surrounding introspective psychological theories that attempt to explain the occurrence of these features. This supplementary discussion will analyze the consistencies between the existing literature and the explanatory power of specific theories in relation to one another. This paper will first give an overview of existing research on these topics and then discuss the findings of this research in its contributions as collective insight.