Oral Presentation by Stefan Diestel¹, Filiz Meidrodt¹, Severin Hornung², Darlin Engstle³, Wladislaw Rivkin⁴
¹ Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany ² University of Innsbruck, Austria ³ Pinktum, Germany ⁴ Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
TIME: Tuesday, 14 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 1
Session: 1
Abstract
In “The Loyal Subject”, the German writer Heinrich Mann characterizes a bourgeois philistine in Germany in the era before WW I. This aggressively conformist, submissive and opportunistic antiheroic character can be considered as a structural scheme for the authoritarian personality studied by Theodor W. Adorno (1950), who delineated a psychoanalytical explanation for the anticipatory obedience (“vorauseilender Gehorsam”) during National socialism. One core implication of Adorno’s studies is that the “authoritarian personality” would still exist even in liberal or democratic societies. After seventy-five years, right-wing populism, neo-fascist movements and chauvinistic ideologies do not only threaten democracies, but also transform whole constitutional institutions (e.g., USA). In the present study, we also draw on a metatheoretical psychological framework, Personality-System-Interaction Theory (Kuhl, 2001), to elaborate on how current societal discourses and working environments can “awaken” the “authoritarian personality” by influencing intrapsychic interactions that facilitate ideological infiltration and promote right-wing authoritarianism. In detail, we propose that neoliberal labor market policy, which facilitate precarious work in the working population, can reproduce authoritarian tendencies and foster right-wing parties. In a study during the German federal election in 2025 (N=271), we analyzed positive indirect effects of subjective precarious work (low income, job insecurity) (Time 1) on voting decision in favor of right-wing parties (i.e., AfD, 3. Way) (Time 4) via right-wing authoritarianism (Time 3). Since ideological self-infiltration via “stress” is modulated by fear of losing control, our analysis also includes implicit power motive that was measured by the Operant Motive Test and processed via large language modeling of the individual responses. Our results demonstrate that the positive indirect effects of precarious work on right-wing voting decision via right-wing authoritarianism was amplified as a function of implicit power motive. In other words, precarious work implies “power stress” (Fodor, 2010) that causes employees with higher power motive to internalize authoritarian worldviews and determines the interaction effect of precarious work and implicit power motive on right-wing authoritarianism. Our findings point to a significant societal risk potential of capitalist exploitation of labor force for democratic institutionalism.