Political Attitudes Research Insights

     Here are some ideas that have informed my political perspective since my undergraduate college years.  They are based loosely on some post-WWII research by Hans Eysenck, a German-British psychologist.  Eysenck used factor analysis to study political attitudes of persons in a number of countries.  Factor analysis is a statistical technique in which the variability in responses to a wide variety of measures is reduced mathematically to a small number of common factors which explain the majority of the variance in all the measures.  Once identified, these factors are then further analyzed to define them by their relationships to other measures. 
     As I recall (although the literature contains a lot of differing interpretations), Eysenck found only two major factors which accounted for the majority of the variation in political attitudes of his respondents.  The first was a sort of progressive/liberal vs. conservative dimension.  The second dimension was defined as being democratic vs. authoritarian/radical. 
     The first factor, of course is forever being redefined, especially the current perception of what it means to be a liberal.  But it seems to encompass the range of left to right positions in a democracy.
     The second factor seemed largely to differentiate how far a person is willing to go to enforce their views upon others.  This authoritarian/radical end of this continuum is interesting to analyze.  First of all it could represent a danger to democratic forms of government or at its worst, generating even killings or wars.  Interestingly, persons scoring high on authoritarian/radical end this dimension seemed to easily transfer their allegiance on the first dimension.  In other words, it was not uncommon for persons with an authoritarian/radical bent to move from being radical progressives to radical conservatives and vice versa, seemingly to show perhaps that these person are more interested in power than in principle.  We also need to be aware that these dangers exist at bother ends of the progressive/liberal vs. conservative spectrum.  Neither side is immune to radicalization.