Desire for group supremacy: the role of social dominance orientation for social policy attitudes

Abstract A key concern in the social policy literature is to understand the causes of support for – but also opposition to – egalitarian and inclusive policies and for political parties that champion such policies. While objective socio-economic factors such as class and gender have long had a central role as predictors of those attitudes in the social policy literature, scholars have more recently begun to incorporate psychological variables, notably right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) or implicit attitudes. Curiously, however, one variable that has been central in social psychological research for about three decades has so far been largely absent in the social policy literature: social dominance orientation (SDO). This omission is problematic not only because SDO is a known predictor of regressive and exclusionary attitudes, but also because SDO itself cross-cuts with other predictors of social policy attitudes (notably class) in theoretically relevant ways. Our contribution here is to highlight and demonstrate the relevance of SDO as an explanatory variable in social policy attitudes research. To do so, we draw on data from an original comparative survey covering five European countries (Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, the United Kingdom) and the United States.