"Comments on "Ideology, Authoritarianism, and Mental Health

I appreciate the invitation to comment at length on Professor Rothman's paper, but before doing so wish to express my admiration and gratitude for the task which he and his co-workers have undertaken and the energy they have expended over many years in probing the political mind at depths to which few before them have ventured. Their Roots of Radicalism (Rothman and Lichter, 1982) is guaranteed the status of milestone along the route many others will travel in our effort to comprehend the motives influencing political behavior, and this latest contribution ably follows up on implications which that earlier work suggested. I mention this at the outset, and at the risk of sounding disingenuous, since the invitation to criticize necessarily places one in the role of exposing warts, in light of which casual readers might be tempted to infer lack of appreciation for the positive side of the contribution. Such is not the case. The main thrust of my comments is as it was in my original review of the manuscript which led up to this article, namely, on what appears to me to be the weak connection between Professor Rothman's characterization of these radicals and his own data. First, in re his first table: Professor Rothman states that the radicals show least concern for affiliation and are more self-assertive (phallic) in orientation, but the figures which he provides are as shown in Table I(a). Hence there is no evidence that radicals are any less affiliative than nonradicals, and the difference in phallic orientations falls just short of significance at the 0.05 level, which is conventionally the minimum level used in social science research. (Professor Rothman also apparently employed the 0.05 level as minimally significant when, in his Table III, he regarded a probability of 0.09 as failing to reach significance.) With respect to his Table III, the same assertion is made (that media elites score lower on n Affiliation than do business elites), and it is also

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• Ideology Authoritarianism and Mental Health

  Stanley Rothman•Political Psychology•1984

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