Authoritarianism in response to threat is possible among the left but more prevalent among the right: a critique of the LWA literature

Introduction There has been a recent surge of interest in left-wing authoritarianism. This new wave has found that LWA is just as prevalent as the more commonly-studied RWA. Following ( Nilsson 2024 ) critique of the LWA literature and ( Osborne et al. 2023 ) suggestion to study threat and authoritarianism across the political spectrum, we conducted secondary data analyses on the interaction between political orientation and different types of threat and the desire for a more authoritarian leader. Method Two cross-sectional samples were collected in Italy in 2022 ( N = 1159) and 2023 ( N = 1668). In both samples, participants were asked their perceived need for a more authoritarian leader and their perceived personal, physical, and economic threat towards two potentially threatening events: The COVID pandemic and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Results We found that (1) a left-wing political orientation was associated with a desire for a more authoritarian leader with reference to the Russian Invasion in the 2023 data; a right-wing political orientation was associated with this desire in the other cases; (2) the effect of threat depended on the larger context; (3) there was little difference in the above relationship across political orientation. Discussion Although we found no evidence that LWA is a prevalent as RWA, the relationship between threat and authoritarianism likely depends on the nature of the threats and the perceived capability of an authoritarian leader to resolve these threats. Pre-registered hypotheses, data, and R code are available at https://osf.io/65hrc .