A NEW DIMENSION TO MEASURE THE AUTHORITAR IAN CHARACTERISTICS

A new questionnaire of the authoritarian personality was constructed c onsisting of items which were designed to measure individual behavior, motivation and feeling. It avoids any questions which refer to politi cal orientations. The questionnaire was developed and tested in four e mpirical studies of almost 3000 people in East and West Germany. As in the studies from 1994 and 1995 the questionnaire includes 26 items an d has a high homogenity. The alpha reliability is r = 0.855 and respec tively r = 0.836. The questionnaire correlates about r = 0.50 to a mea sure of right-wing extremism, a result which could be taken as a hint to its validity.