Inside Right-Wing Authoritarianism: Item-Level Dynamics with COVID-19 Fear and Prevention Beliefs

<p>The COVID-19 pandemic provides a distinctive context for examining how authoritarian attitudes relate to risk perception and preventive norms under sustained uncertainty. Drawing on seven waves of U.S. panel data collected during mid-2020, this study applies dynamic network modeling to investigate reciprocal relations between individual right-wing authoritarian (RWA) items, COVID-19 fear, and prevention beliefs. Results partially supported the expectation that COVID-19 fear predicts stronger subsequent endorsement of particular RWA items and supported the expectation that particular RWA items predict lower subsequent prevention beliefs. Exploratory analyses revealed heterogeneous reverse-temporal and cross-level relations, most notably that endorsement of “cracking down on troublemakers” predicted subsequent reductions in several forms of COVID-19 fear. Prevention beliefs also predicted both increases and decreases in subsequent endorsement of different RWA items. These results provide context-specific evidence for the value of examining the particular attitudinal content represented in RWA measures when studying risk-related cognition and public-health responses, rather than assuming uniform relations across items or broader threat contexts.</p>