Many people have argued that Altemeyer's measurement is flawed because it confounds ideology and authoritarianism (see, e.g., Duckitt, Bizumic, Krauss, & Heled, 2010). It is then worth asking: Why did we opt to use this particular measurement as a baseline for constructing an LWA measurement in the present work? One might argue that because Altemeyer's RWA scale is not a good measurement of authoritarianism, we are looking in the wrong place to find the Loch Ness Monster.

As we will illustrate below, we do believe Altemeyer's RWA scale confounds ideology and authoritarianism—but that makes it more (not less) important to use our method to disentangle those two things in our search for LWA. We discuss the importance of our approach along three different lines: its pragmatic interface with the literature, its methodological disentanglement of ideology and authoritarianism, and its potential contribution to larger theories about ideology.

The pragmatic case: How is RWA measurement used and viewed? It is important to note that whether Altemeyer's RWA scale is a viable measurement or not, it is widely used as both a measurement of authoritarianism and ideology. Indeed, a Google Scholar search revealed that Altemeyer's (1981) work has been cited 2,244 times, and even the more recent Altemeyer (1998) work has been cited 1,519 times. While not all of these citations are directly for the scale itself, they nonetheless illustrate the impact of Altemeyer's conceptualization. Indeed, there is no sign that use of his conceptualization is slowing down: Altemeyer's RWA measurement continues to be—by far—the most widely used scientific measurement of authoritarianism. To illustrate, we narrowed our search to a more behavioral‐sciences‐focused database: PsychInfo. Produced by the American Psychological Association, PsychInfo is a long‐running standard for searchable databases in the field. It covers journals that are “psychologically relevant, archival, scholarly, peer‐reviewed, and regularly published with titles, abstracts, and keywords in English…99% are peer‐reviewed journals.”2 This method allows us not only to more directly illustrate a behavioral‐sciences‐specific focus on Altemeyer's scale, but it also allows for a controlled slice of general, consensually accepted scientific mechanisms. Thus, while not fully capturing the potential influence of other conceptualizations in other fields, PsychInfo is at least a good barometer of the current relative influence of various scales in the behavioral sciences. Using PsychInfo, we further narrowed our search to recent articles (from January 2016 to December 2016) using “authoritarianism,” “RWA,” and “right‐wing authoritarianism” as search terms. We focused on recent articles to illustrate current trends as a counterpart to the general historical dominance of Altemeyer's scale. We then looked in the methods sections of all studies that contained measurements of authoritarianism and noted which measurement was used. Results are presented in Table 1. As can be seen there, this survey of the most recent authoritarianism articles overwhelmingly supported the notion that Altemeyer's RWA scale is by far still the most‐used scale: Altemeyer's RWA scale was used in 18 published papers, more than triple the next closest authoritarianism scale (Zakrisson's 2005 RWA scale, which was used in five published papers)3 and more than four times Duckitt et al.'s (2010) RWA scale (used in four published papers). Many of the other scales we found in our search were not intended to measure general right‐wing authoritarianism at all but were specific to a particular context (such as evaluating mental illness attitudes, parenting, or teaching). When RWA as a general construct was the conceptual target of the article, the majority of the time it was measured using Altemeyer's scale.4 Table 1. Measurements of Authoritarianism Used in Published Research From January to December, 2016 Number of Articles Altemeyer's ( 1981 18 Zakrisson's ( 2005 5 Duckitt et al.'s ( 2010 4 CAMI Authoritarian Subscale 3 Parenting Practices Questionnaire 3 F‐scale 2 ANES Child‐Rearing Items 2 Parenting Authority Questionnaire 1 Irrational Teacher Beliefs Subscale 1 Lederer's ( 1982 1 Dunwoody, Hsiung, & Funke's ( 2009 1 World Values Survey Items 1 Further, specific arguments by researchers show that, while the measurement is sometimes viewed controversially, it is not universally considered to be a “bad” measurement of right‐wing authoritarianism. For example, Crouse and Stalker (2007) argue that Altemeyer's RWA scale items “provide a widely accepted operational definition of how strongly a person holds right‐wing authoritarian beliefs” (p. 25). As late as 2014, the same authors (Crouse & Stalker, 2014) defended the wide use of the scale in Political Psychology against an attack upon it: “Altemeyer has shown that his RWA scale, despite Thomas's dislike of it, has good reliability, predicts many things it should predict, and does not predict things it should not predict. The scale thus appears to have both predictive and discriminant validity. It does its sorting job well enough to be a standard psychometric instrument on this topic, if not the standard instrument” (p. 115). As a result of its continued wide usage and its continued defense as a standard measurement of the construct it is named for, the research community should not dismiss it out of hand as a lens for viewing RWA (and thus LWA). Whether we happen to like the measurement or not, it is continuing to shape the field as we know it. And that has practical implications for our theoretical understanding of conservatives and liberals. As a result, it is important to better evaluate what might happen if we try to balance this highly used scale from an ideological perspective.

The methodological case: Two ways to disentangle authoritarianism from ideology We agree with other researchers (e.g., Thomas, 2013) who have argued that the scale confounds ideology and authoritarianism. Indeed, practically, it has been used as a measurement of both—and the fact that it clearly taps into both makes it in our view a potentially problematic measurement of both ideology and conservatism. But that does not make it irrelevant to authoritarianism. Quite the contrary: It clearly taps into something about authoritarianism beyond mere ideological conservatism. Rather, it means that as a marker of whether or not conservatives are themselves more authoritarian than liberals, it is not a very good measurement because it confounds conservatism and authoritarianism in the measurement itself. How can we go about unconfounding them? One way to disentangle the two is to create value‐neutral measurements that have no ideology in them at all and then see how those measurements relate to ideology. And yet, while this method is of course valid and useful, it is prone to error: Supposedly value‐neutral measurements can contain loaded responses that predetermine a conclusion. For example, although Rokeach's dogmatism measurement has been hailed as value neutral (Jost et al., 2003), research suggests that it leans ideologically conservative (Ray, 1970; for discussions, see Conway et al., 2015; Van Hiel et al., 2003), and therefore a correlation between dogmatism and conservatism may say more about the ideological bent of the dogmatism items, rather than the fact that conservatives are dogmatic. In the present project, we follow a different approach for teasing apart authoritarianism from ideology: Rather than attempt to create value‐neutral items, we instead try to create parallel authoritarian items on both sides of the political spectrum (for an exemplar with dogmatism, see Conway et al., 2015). To the degree that politically charged items on the left show the same pattern as politically charged items on the right, this suggests a fairly symmetrical pattern of authoritarianism on both sides.