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Authoritarianism in Black and White: Testing the Cross-Racial Validity of the Child Rearing Scale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Efrén O. Pérez  and
Marc J. Hetherington
Efrén O. Pérez*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, PMB 505, 230 Appleton Place, Nashville, TN 37203
Marc J. Hetherington
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, PMB 505, 230 Appleton Place, Nashville, TN 37203
*
email: [email protected] (corresponding author)
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Abstract

Using a scale of child rearing preferences, scholars find that African Americans are far more authoritarian than Whites. We argue that this racial gap in authoritarianism is largely a measurement artifact. The child rearing scale now used to measure authoritarianism is cross-racially invalid because it draws heavily on a metaphor about hierarchy. Akin to someone who favors enforcing conformity in a child, the authoritarian is thought to be inclined toward enforcing conformity in social subordinates. In both cases, one's perspective is drawn from a position of relative power. We believe this metaphor is effective among members of a majority racial group because individual dominance at home meshes with group dominance in society. For members of a racial minority, we believe this metaphor breaks down. Using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we establish that Blacks and Whites construe the child rearing items differently. Consequently, authoritarianism correlates highly with the things it should for Whites, but rarely so for Blacks. Using an illegal immigration experiment, we then show divergent patterns of intolerance based on the same child rearing scale. Our results highlight measurement's role in producing large racial gaps in authoritarianism, while illuminating the racial boundaries of the child rearing scale.

Type
Regular Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , Summer 2014 , pp. 398 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Authors' note: For constructive comments and advice on an earlier version of this article, we thank Cindy Kam, Casey Klofstad, Taeku Lee, Natalie Masuoka, Francisco Pedraza, and Karthick Ramakrishnan. Replication materials are available from the Political Analysis Dataverse at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/24094. Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site.

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