Replication Data for: "The Conditional Associations of Authoritarianism with Americans’ Responses to COVID-19: An Out-of-Sample Replication"

Abstract: Seeking to understand why right-wing Americans adopted a lax response to COVID-19 despite psychological theories of threat sensitivity and dispositional security needs that might have predicted the opposite, Ollerenshaw (2022) shows that dispositional authoritarianism was conditionally associated with Americans’ responses to COVID-19. Examining national surveys, Ollerenshaw (2022) finds that authoritarianism was directly associated with greater concern for COVID-19 and concomitant health behaviors and preferences toward public health restrictions; indirectly, however, authoritarianism was associated with right-wing political identification and cue-taking for politically engaged Americans, which reduced these individuals’ level of concern over COVID-19 and their willingness to engage in health behaviors and support public health restrictions. In this note, I conduct an out-of-sample replication of Ollerenshaw (2022) using the Voter Study Group survey (n=3,275). I similarly find authoritarianism was conditionally related to concerns about COVID-19 and preferences toward public health restrictions, with similar or even larger effects. This replication adds weight to Ollerenshaw’s (2022) claim that psychological traits and political context jointly influenced Americans’ responses to COVID-19.