Karen Stenner

Karen Stenner is a political scientist specializing in political psychology. Stenner has studied the political activation of authoritarian personality types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Stenner

In 2005, Stenner published The Authoritarian Dynamic

she asserts that Bob Altemeyer's right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) scale is best understood as a measure of expressed authoritarianism, and that other measures are needed to assess authoritarian predispositions

To this end, she rejects Altemeyer's "social learning" interpretation and instead argues that authoritarianism is a dynamic response to perceived external threats; not a static personality type based only on the traits of submission, aggression and conventionalism.

resistance to interpersonal difference (i.e. diversity of people and beliefs at a given moment),

Authoritarianism can thus be thought of as aversion to difference across space, whereas conservatism is aversion to difference across time.

She thus argues that much of what is conventionally referred to as "racism" is perhaps better understood as "difference-ism," with moral and political diversity (as opposed merely to ethnic diversity) especially provoking intolerant attitudes from authoritarian individuals.

she asserts that authoritarians are never more tolerant than when reassured and pacified by an autocratic culture, and never more intolerant than when forced to endure a vibrant democracy.

she cites perceptions of poor leadership and belief diversity (i.e. lack of consensus in group values) as being the two most significant factors contributing to the authoritarian response

When otherwise abated by belief consensus and leadership which they regard as sufficiently strong however, authoritarians express very low levels of moral, racial, and political intolerance.

According to Stenner, authoritarianism is primarily the result of cognitive inhibitions and personality factors which significantly limit one's ability to tolerate ambiguity, complexity, and—by extension—sociocultural diversity. Authoritarians rank very low on openness to experience—one of the Big Five personality traits

she argues that authoritarians are best understood as "simple-minded avoiders of complexity rather than closed-minded avoiders of change." (cf Future Shock, Clinger Party)

She similarly rejects the hypothesis that religiosity is a contributory factor to authoritarian beliefs

Though focusing primarily on authoritarian predispositions as they are expressed by individuals on the American political right, Stenner nonetheless notes that the dynamic can appear elsewhere on the political spectrum.

She also notes that approximately one-third of authoritarians tend towards socialism

Likewise, she asserts that any perceived relation between authoritarianism and laissez-faire economic policies is inconsistent

Stenner identifies the same psychological phenomenon cross-nationally

studies conducted on identical twins reared in separate environments which have found that authoritarian predispositions have a significant genetic component, on account of them being rooted in personality variables which in turn are substantially heritable.

authoritarians living within Eastern European nations expressed relatively low levels of racial, moral, and political intolerance prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as socialist autocracies provided citizens with normative reassurance (the former-Yugoslavia under the rule of Josip Broz Tito being one of the most notable examples). Following the Fall of Communism and subsequent institution of liberal democratic norms, authoritarians within these countries began to express more intolerant attitudes

Stenner thus extrapolates that authoritarianism is not a "learned" phenomenon, but rather an innate psychological tendency which can be found within all civilizations worldwide, and that individuals so predisposed to it "will never live comfortably in a liberal democracy".

concludes her analysis by suggesting that authoritarian predilections can only be deterred through responsible leadership and favourable societal conditions, and that such an impediment is perhaps a contributing factor to previously-failed attempts at instituting liberal-democratic norms in formerly-autocratic cultures such as those found in Iraq and Afghanistan. (nation-building)

One cannot create a self-governing community where no community truly exists... democracy does not produce community, it requires community

She consequently upholds parliamentary systems of government as examples of "stealth democracy" which are less susceptible to authoritarian influences

Conversely, she argues against the multilevel structure of the U.S. political order, stressing that it serves ultimately to amplify public disagreement, propagate adversaries, and polarize the electorate—conditions which are all guaranteed to exacerbate the authoritarian dynamic.

all the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviours.

it is the appearance of sameness that matters, and that apparent variance in beliefs, values, and culture seem to be more provocative of intolerant dispositions than racial and ethnic diversity (cf cultural pluralism)

regrettably, nothing is more certain to provoke increased expression of their latent predispositions than the likes of “multicultural education,” bilingual policies, and non-assimilation

research that helps to explain the rise of the Alt-right and other culturally-nationalist sentiments in the lead-up to the 2016 United States Presidential election

Stenner's work suggests that these events appeared surprising or mystifying to many contemporary commentators mainly because they were not provoked by any specific event, but rather because they were a predictable backlash against the gradual increase in diversity and tolerance of difference that has characterized the last several decades of liberal democracy Cf Precarity, future shock

In 2018, Jonathan Haidt and Stenner collaborated to write a chapter for Can it Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America