Chapter 43 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

ARE THE WORKERS AUTHORITARIAN, CONSERVATIVE OR BOTH?



John J. Ray

Lipset's theory that members of the working class are characteristically authoritarian and conservative is discussed. It is shown that the evaluation of this theory in the literature has often been negative. A distinction is proposed between authoritarianism and social conservatism. In two studies -- one with army conscripts and one with a door-to-door survey -- it is shown that working class people are more conservative on social issues but are not characteristically authoritarian. Working class people did obtain higher scores on a balanced version of the F scale but did not obtain higher scores on Ray's balanced attitude to authority scale. The results are shown to be interpretable in the light of the existing literature and are held to constitute qualified support for Lipset's theory.

IN 1959 Lipset published his immediately controversial article asserting that working class ideology was characteristically 'authoritarian'. The same article included in his 1960 book as a chapter gave his contentions an even wider public and stimulated yet further criticisms. One outcome of these criticisms -- particularly that by Miller & Riessman (1961) -- was that Lipset, in 1961, published what was in effect a considerable weakening of his earlier position. He claimed that, instead of talking about working class ideology in general, he was merely trying to explain the phenomenon of Communism. This reduced his thesis to something of a tautology: A particular sub-set of the working class are authoritarian and because of this they become Communist. But surely the authoritarian nature of Communism was never in any case seriously in question. Lipset's revised thesis reduces very nearly to: some members of the working class become authoritarian because they are in fact authoritarian! For this reason the present paper will focus on Lipset's original thesis as being of greatest interest.

The results of much subsequent research have not been kind to Lipset's original thesis. Lipsitz (1965) re-analysed a part of Lipset's original data and showed that education alone could account for the ideological differences described. Hamilton (1968) showed that preference for aggressiveness in foreign policy was more characteristic of the middle than the lower class. Stacey & Green (1971) also considered that their British results supported the criticisms by Miller & Riessman (1961) -- although detailed perusal of their results does show a second order factor described as reflecting 'self-interest combined with a certain firmness of conviction and toughness' which correlated significantly (.31) with non-skilled occupational status. Factor scores are however notoriously unreliable and none of the other factors extracted in the study showed any association with occupation.

It is then against the background of these negative evaluations of Lipset's thesis that the work to be reported below was carried out. It is hoped in this work that certain improvements in measurement of the variables concerned may provide answers in which greater confidence can be placed than has heretofore been possible. In detail, Lipset (1960) propounds that members of the working class are characteristically more authoritarian and more conservative. They are less tolerant of weakness, more punitive, more dogmatic and more ethnocentric. They are radical only on those issues where their own immediate selfish advantage is to be served, i.e. on economic issues. Thus their preference for Social Democratic political parties reflects not working class ideology but working class economic self-interest. This is a rather plausible theory on some counts and it is a possibilty worth considering that the contradictions observed between the data of Lipset and the data presented by Hamilton may at least in part be explained by the type of evidence upon which both authors rely.

The evidence upon which both Lipset and Hamilton base their conclusions is almost entirely of the single-question type (derived from public opinion polls) and substantial misclassification of people can arise in this way. For instance Lipset classes people as authoritarians who, when asked how many parties there should be, reply 'one' -- on the rationale that the desire for a one-party state arises from a desire to do away with dissent. Quite the opposite may be true. In the experience of the present author the questionnaire item: 'It would be much better if we could do without politics altogether' was presumed (on a rationale similar to Lipset's ) to tap authoritarianism and was included in an experimental scale of authoritarianism as a positive item. In fact it turned out to be a very strong negative item -- being assented to by anti-authoritarians who saw it as asserting anarchism to be the political ideal.

In a similar vein one might contend that people desiring only one political party could thereby be choosing an ideal of brotherly and egalitarian consensus, rather than an authoritarian dictatorship.

This highlights the central problem of moving from answers to specific opinion questions to theories about general traits. Initially, one must gather prior evidence that the subject responds to the aspects of the question that we intend him to respond to. Secondly, if we believe each of our questions reflects some element of a general trait we must also have evidence for this assumption in the form of correlations between responses to each item. Both these requirements are met by a standard Likert-type attitude scale such as social psychologists normally employ. Lipset, however, reports evidence from only one such scale -- the California 'F' scale. The well-known defect with this scale (Brown, 1965) is that the more items one agrees with, the higher one's score. In other words, a person with an acquiescent response set will artificially be represented as a high authoritarian. Thus, although F scale scores do increase as one moves down the Socio-Economic Status scale (Brown, 1965) this could well be because incomprehension or a 'don't care' attitude to questionnaires among lower class respondents leads to an artificially high level of 'Yes' responding.

There is a way to preclude this possibility. One can so word the questionnaire that a respondent must disagree with half of the items to get a high score. Under these circumstances acquiescent response set would have no systematic effect on the final score. Scales where half the items are negatively worded are called 'balanced' scales. In the present work balanced scales are very heavily relied upon.

Before we consider particular instruments, however, some conceptual clarifications are also in order. The term 'authoritarian' is a label that has been used to cover a multitude of sins. The present author (Ray, 1971; 1972c) is only one of many who have insisted that there is an important distinction between authoritarianism and conservatism and yet Lipset's own usage does show strong tendencies to confuse the two -- if not indeed to treat them as interchangeable. This confusion would seem to stem from the treatment given to the two constructs by Adorno et al. (1950). These authors tended towards the conclusion that authoritarianism was simply a more extreme version of conservatism. While this is now a common usage, it is argued here that it is unduly loose and certainly not the most profitable definition. While it is an empirical possibility that such things as attitude to innovation and attitude to authority may be related, it seems singularly unwise to make an advance assumption to that effect in every instance. Following Ray (1971) the practice adopted in this chapter will be to use the word 'authoritarian' to refer only to acceptance/ rejection of authority -- there will be no automatic assumption that a person acceptant of authority is psychologically sick, ethnocentric, superstitious, extrapunitive or 'intolerant of ambiguity' -- particularly since Ray (1971 ) and Ray (1972c) have shown that the opposite is true as far as the first two attributes are concerned. The broader category of attributes that Lipset had in mind when describing working class ideology will however be referred to below -- under the label of 'social conservatism'. By this will be meant hostility to social change --particularly where those changes or innovations are in a humanitarian or permissive direction. Ethnocentrism will be taken as an example par excellence of social conservatism. The reference to 'social change' above, however, does not include issues with a primarily economic impact. It is an essential part of Lipset's case that economic issues are responded to differently from other social issues.

METHOD AND RESULTS

The data reported below derive from two quite different studies using different measuring instruments. For all this, as will be seen, the conclusions are remarkably similar.

Study I

The sample used for the first study was the entire October 1968 'National Service' intake at No. 3. Training Battalion, Singleton, NSW. See here (the preceding chapter in this book) for a fuller description and discussion of this sample.

To this sample was given the scale described in Ray (1972a) as the 'General Conservatism' scale. Since this scale includes no directly political items or items of economic reference it might in fact equally well be described as a 'Social Conservatism' scale. It includes seven items from the California F scale which, as was argued above, reflects strong elements of social conservatism as well as authoritarianism per se. Unlike the F scale, however, the present scale is completely balanced -- containing 12 negatively and 12 positively scored items. The correlation between its positive and negative halves was -.206 and the coefficient 'alpha' reliability was .70. These statistics are not high enough to preclude the possibility of other profitable clusterings of the items but they do more than adequately attest to the propriety and usefulness of the present conceptualisation of the 'Social Conservatism' variable.

A second scale given to the same sample was the 'Perceived Economic Deprivation' scale. On a pre-test with a sample of 60 state public service clerical employees this scale had been reduced from 18 items to six items and shown a reliability ('coefficient alpha') of .61. It was included to allow a more careful examination of Lipset's theory. Deprivation as perceived might differ quite radically from actual economic deprivation. What is wealth to one man may be poverty to another. In other words, it was felt that perceived economic deprivation might be a better predictor of economic conservatism than actual economic deprivation. It has a similar effect to a respondent's own estimate of his class position, but class in economic terms only.

Information on education and prior occupation was also obtained from each recruit. Occupational status was scored with the help of Congalton's (1969) scale but scored so that a high score represented a high status. The PED scale was also scored so that a high score represented upper-class self-perception.

The correlations of all variables are given in Table 1. The mean and SD on the conservatism scale were 71.44 and 10.38.

TABLE 1

Correlations of the conservatism and class indices on 404 National Servicemen. All correlations in the matrix are statistically significant.

..............................PED......Occ. Status.....Education.....Conservatism

PED.......................1.000.......... .152............. .229................-.272
Occ. Status.............................1.000............. .468................-.253
Education......................................................1.000...............-.288
Conservatism........................................................................1.000

Against all three indices of class the conservatism scale correlated significantly negatively. Although not great in magnitude, the correlations are (given the large numbers in the sample) highly significant statistically (p < .001). This represents an advance over Lipset's work in that the magnitude of the expected relationship can now be presented and is shown in fact to be relatively low.

One question of interest is whether the relationships observed could be attributed only to the ethnocentrism items the scale included. This question was examined by omitting the ethnocentrism items and calculating a new total score. The correlations of this new score with the class indices dropped only slightly to -.255, -.227 and -.273 respectively.

Also note that although occupation and education are themselves related, they do make independent contributions to conservatism. The correlation of occupation and conservatism with education partialled out does drop from -.253 to -.140 but is still, as such, significant at the < .01 level.

Study II

Although the sample used in the prior study has several advantages, one might wonder whether the same results could be achieved with a more conventional type of sample. The second study was designed to set such doubts at rest while refining and extending the earlier results. The customary form of survey research involves house-to-house calls. For the sake of obtaining closer comparability with other research therefore, it was desired to extend the other findings reported by a further study of the door-to-door type.

It was also hoped at the outset that some test might be given of the possibility that horizontal social stratification might not exhaust the possibilities of predicting conservatism. It was hoped, in particular, that some examination of differences in general conservatism between professionals and business people could be given. This desire arose from a theory which had suggested itself to the author to the effect that the small overall differences in conservatism elsewhere observed could be accounted for by opposing tendencies in the two upper class groups. It might for instance be true that while the professionals in the upper class are very radical on social issues, the business people in the upper class are no more radical than the lower classes are. This theory would allow us to predict both the low overall level of the correlation between class and conservatism and the high degree of radicalism among university students (Lipset, 1965). The students are both themselves pre-professionals and are highly likely in Australia to come from professional homes. That there might be a substantial difference in the attitudes of people who have entered the higher income groups via salesmanship, clerical ability, or entrepreneurship and those who have entered via higher education is at the very least a clear possibility.

A questionnaire was made up to include measures of all the constructs treated previously. Conservatism was represented by three scales on this occasion. The range of data available may be summarised as: Age, Sex, Occupation, Subjective class, Education, Political Party Preference, Political Conservatism, Social Conservatism, Economic Conservatism, Attitude to Authority (Ray, 1971), Dogmatism (Ray, 1970a), and Authoritarianism (BF scale -- see Ray 1972d) . This required what is a very long questionnaire for door-to-door administration -- totalling 219 items.

Since the volunteer artifact could be expected to be large with such a long questionnaire, the survey was conducted so as to do everything possible to minimise this. High-pressure salesmanship strategies were used to ensure that initially almost every person contacted did accept the questionnaire. After introducing the questionnaire, the interviewer left after securing an undertaking that he could call back 'this time next week' to collect the completed inventory. If the householder had not completed the questionnaire when the back-call was made, an arrangement for a second call was worked out. Having initially accepted the questionnaire and having this 'nice young man' call back specifically to collect it put the respondents under some considerable pressure to complete the task-particularly after the first fruitless back-call.

The sampling method used was one specifically designed to suit the theoretical requirements of this study. Ideally what a test of Lipset's theory requires is a random sample of upper-class people and a random sample of lower-class people. One can then test for differences on the variables of conservatism, authoritarianism, etc. As the nearest approximation to this very difficult sampling requirement, it was thought best to obtain random samples from upper and lower-class areas. To make sure the areas chosen for this purpose did clearly fall into one or the other category, only areas with extreme scores (7 or 1) on Congalton's scale of prestige of Sydney suburbs (Congalton, 1969) were used. When a suburb had been chosen, two blocks from each were chosen from the map by the pin and blindfold method. An attempt was then made to interview someone from each house in the block. Not-at-homes were called back on up to twice. Persons contacted were told 'Anyone in the house can fill out the questionnaire'. This instruction had the primary purpose of increasing the response rate but it also had the important secondary benefit of increasing the number of non-housewives filling out the questionnaire. Respondents quite often said: 'That's good -- I'll give it to my husband to do'. The times of sampling included weekdays, evenings and weekends. Respondents were classified using the manual-non-manual dichotomy of occupations (See Ray, 1971). Housewives are of course engaged by and large in a manual occupation but they were not scored as manual unless they lived in a working-class area. Housewives from upper-class areas were scored 2 (non-manual).

Because the main hypothesis under consideration had already once been confirmed it was felt that the sampling in this survey might be terminated when an n of 150 was reached. This 150 was to be composed of 50 people in manual occupations, 50 people in nonmanual professional occupations, and 50 people in non-manual, non-professional occupations.

When the survey was complete, closer examination revealed substantial incompleteness in 32 out of the 150 questionnaires. This left an n for analysis of 118 -- 42 manual and 76 non-manual. Broken up by age, there were in the sample 16 people under 21, 24 between 21 and 30 and 78 over 30. By sex there were 74 females and 44 males. It will be seen therefore that the biases of this sample are opposite to those of the previous study. Even so, it will be seen that age and sex differences have here little effect on the variables under consideration.

Before the results are presented, however, some further description of the scales used is necessary. The attitude to authority scale has been very fully described and justified in Ray (1971) . It does have claims to represent a valid measure of authoritarianism in the strict sense specified earlier. The same article also gives the items of the three conservatism scales. The social conservatism scale differs from the previous one in containing no items from the California F scale. All scales contained balancing against acquiescent response set.

The 'BF' scale was a balanced version of the California F scale. It was rather more successful than previous balanced versions of this scale in that its positive and negative halves correlated -.56. Its coefficient 'alpha' reliability was .86. See Ray (1972d) for a listing of the items. The balanced Dogmatism scale was a further development of that presented in Ray (1970a ) . Because of the findings reported in Ray (1971), subjective class was measured by the new 'subjective index' and objective class by the manual/ non-manual dichotomy.

The relationships observed furnished another, even clearer confirmation of Lipset's thesis. Not only did social conservatism and the BF scale correlate respectively -.218 and -.304 with occupation but economic conservatism correlated .253. All three correlations are precisely what Lipset's theory would predict. The balanced Dogmatism scale also correlated -.283. All correlations are significant. Perhaps most interesting of all, however, was the fact that the Attitude to Authority (AA) scale and the Political Conservatism scale failed to correlate with occupation. The product-moment coefficients in the study were -.073 and -.067 respectively. Other correlations of interest were of the BF scale with the AA scale (.539), and of the BF with the social conservatism scale (.717). See Table 2.

TABLE 2

Correlations observed in Study II. Significant level of r (< .05) is .180 two-tailed and .155 one-tailed. N = 118. Decimal points omitted. Political party preference ("Vote") is scored so that a high score indicates conservatism.

.......................Sex.......Occ......Subj. I......Ed........Vote......Pol. C.....Soc. C

Age................ -018......-063.......-113......-090........-086.......074.........183
Sex...............................060.......-024.....-011..........057.......204.........068
Occupation.................................406......104..........388......-067........-218
Subj. Index..............................................444..........407.......015........-114
Education................................................................144......-034........-170
Vote......................................................................................312.........194
Polit. Conservatism............................,.................................................528

TABLE 2 (Continued)

......................................Econ Cons......AA.........BD..........BF

Age..................................157...............173........123........218
Sex...................................206..............-036......-021........031
Occupation.......................253..............-073......-283.......-304
Subj. Index.......................192..............-103......-204.......-130
Education........................-118..............-133......-145.......-047
Vote..................................393...............302.......072........097
Polit. Conservatism..........400...............638.......204........519
Social Conservatism.........242..............504.......408........717
Economic conservatism........................191......-126........102
Attitude to authority........................................... 328........539
Balanced Dogmatism........................................................617

It is also worth noting that balancing the F scale seems to have eliminated any correlation of that scale with education. The Social Conservatism scale is however significantly related (on a one-tailed test only) to educational level. This however has no real effect on the correlation between this scale and occupation. With the influence of education removed by partial correlation, the correlation between social conservatism and occupation drops only to -.205. The correlations representing the above relationship, although amply significant, are in absolute terms quite small. This is as it should be: Working class origin can obviously be only one of the many conditions giving rise to increased personal conservatism.

For the study of differences between the two upper class groups alone the sample was at this point further subdivided. Unfortunately there was a substantial group of upper class respondents who could not be placed in one of the two groups (professional versus nonprofessional). These were mostly people for whom the only occupational information available was 'housewife'. The n for this set of tests was therefore reduced to a level which could only be described as providing a 'preliminary look' at the questions involved.

The means and SDs for the three subsets of the sample on all the attitude scales are given in Table 3. The only difference between the two upper class groups that is significant is the difference on 'BF" scale scores. The t is 1.83. This is not significant at the < .05 level if a two-tailed test is used but since the difference is in the theoretically expected direction, a one-tailed test is appropriate.

TABLE 3

MEANS AND SDs OF THREE OCCUPATIONAL GROUPS ON ATTITUDE SCALE SCORES. (SDs given in brackets.)

The differences between the business people and the workers and the business people and the professionals are both significant at the <.05 level for the 'BF' scale (t = 1.84 and 1.83).

For Social conservatism, only the difference between the professionals and the workers is significant.

.........Scale.......................Business..........Professionals.............Workers
.........................................(n - 20)...............(n - 37)......................(n-42)

Political Conservatism.......33.50 (4.78).......30.78 ( 7.54)............32.97 ( 6.20)
Social Conservatism..........47.20 (5.97)......43.08 (10.47)............50.71 ( 9.57)
Economic Conservatism....69.25 (8.04)......67.10 ( 9.80)............63.97 ( 6.98)
'AA'.....................................68.60 (9.88)......65.45 (11.63)...........68.15 ( 8.98)
'BD'....................................88.75 (9.65)......85.27 (12.28)...........97.00 (12.05)
'BF'.....................................75.70 (9.01)......70.27 (11.02)...........81.87 (11.62)

Note that the overall lack of significance in the observed differences may be attributable not only to the small n but also the great variability in answers (SDs) from the professionals. Although the differences between the two upper class groups were not significant for Social conservatism it is perhaps some support for the hypothesis to note that, as predicted, the mean scores of the business people are much closer to those of the workers than they are to those of the professionals. Considering the small degrees of freedom (55) these, results overall are quite satisfying. Significant differences were in fact demonstrated on one of the two critical attitude scales and the differences for the second attitude scale were at least in the expected direction.

DISCUSSION

It has been shown that on two quite different samples Lipset's contention that social conservatism and working class membership are related is supported. This is surely important data to set along side previous work on Lipset's thesis. How may the present findings be then integrated with previous work?

The distinction made here between authoritarianism and social conservatism does bear the brunt of the explanation. As well as the above result, the present work has shown with equal clarity that authoritarianism strictly defined does not correlate with working class membership. In the broad sense of authoritarianism, as used by Lipset and Adorno et al. before him, the workers are authoritarian; in the strict sense of authoritarianism as simply implying favourable judgments if authority as such, the workers are not authoritarian. This does represent a vindication of the criticisms of the F scale's validity made by Miller & Riesman (1961). When an authoritarianism scale of demonstrated predictive validity is used (the AA scale), the relationship with class does disappear.

The second methodological improvement (use of balanced scales) would appear to have a role in negating the claims of Lipsitz (1965). The balanced F scale is not related to education. That less educated people might be more prone to yeasaying with questionnaires is eminently reasonable. Lipsitz's finding of a relationship between the original F scale and education may therefore be seen as an acquiescence artifact only. When acquiescence is controlled for there is no relationship.

Greater understanding of Hamilton's results is also possible in the light of the present work. As was pointed out earlier, the use of single questions is fraught with methodological perils if one wishes to make inferences about general traits. Some at least of these doubts are set at rest by the use of concept-specific attitude scales. The political conservatism scale used in the second study was meant to get at the sort of thing discussed by Hamilton. Its items were restricted in reference solely to questions about foreign policy and military preparedness. As was mentioned, this scale did not correlate at all with class membership. If Hamilton had taken similar methodological precautions, his results might have been similar. One enlightening side effect of Hamilton's work, however, lies in the distinction between political and social conservatism that was thereby necessitated. It is shown in fact that one must be careful of overgeneralizing Lipset's thesis. It is only on issues of social (domestic) policy -- policies that could have an immediate and imaginable personal impact -- that the workers are more conservative. On issues of international policy there is no characteristic class polarisation.

Note that in Australia the party system is polarised along both economic and foreign policy lines. The foreign policy 'doves' are all in the same party as the (nominal) economic policy socialists. The failure of the political conservatism scale to relate to class, however, shows that attitudes in the community at large are not similarly polarised. Foreign policy preference and social class are independent sources of support for the relevant parties.

In conclusion, therefore, we must say that the workers are not authoritarian -- but they are socially conservative. Of those in non-manual occupations, the professionals are more socially radical than the business people. Once again the equation of authoritarianism with conservatism breaks down.

The demonstrated conservatism of the workers must raise serious questions about just who our radical politicians do represent. If our radicals were barred from using the bribery of simplistic and unfulfillable economic promises, would they receive any votes from the workers at all? At the very least one must ask whether the accession to power of a radical political party gives it any warrant to introduce 'permissive' social policies.

REFERENCES

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality New York: Harper.

Brown, R.(1965) Social psychology N.Y.: Free Press.

Congalton, A.A. (1969) Status and prestige in Australia Melbourne: Cheshire.

Hamilton, R. (1968) A research note on the mass support for "tough" military initiatives. Amer. Sociological Rev. 33, 439-445.

Lipset, S.M. (1959) Democracy and working class authoritarianism American Sociological Review 24, 482-502.

Lipset, S.M. (1960) Political man N.Y.: Doubleday.

Lipset, S.M. (1961) Working class authoritarianism: A reply to Miller & Riesman. British J. Sociology 12, 277-281.

Lipset, S.M. (1965) Students and politics. In S.M. Lipset & S.S. Wolin (Eds.) The Berkeley Student Revolt N.Y.: Doubleday

Lipsitz, L. (1965) Working class authoritarianism: A re-evaluation. Amer. Sociological Rev 30, 103-109.

Miller, S.M. & Riessman, F. (1961) Working class authoritarianism: A critique of Lipset. British J. Sociology, 12, 263-276.

Ray, J.J. (1970) The development and validation of a balanced Dogmatism scale. Australian Journal of Psychology, 22, 253-260.

Ray, J.J. (1971) An "Attitude to Authority" scale. Australian Psychologist, 6, 31-50.

Ray, J.J. (1972a) Are conservatism scales irreversible? British J. Social & Clinical Psychology 11, 346-352.

Ray, J.J. (1972b) Non-ethnocentric authoritarianism. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Sociology 8(June), 96-102.

Ray, J.J. (1972c) Militarism, authoritarianism, neuroticism and anti-social behavior. Journal of Conflict Resolution 16, 319-340.

Ray, J.J. (1972d) A new balanced F scale -- And its relation to social class. Australian Psychologist 7, 155-166.

Stacey, B.G. & Green, R.T. (1968) The psychological bases of political allegiance among white-collar males. British J. Clinical Psychol. 7, 45-60.


APPENDIX

The Perceived Economic Deprivation Scale. alpha = .61. Response options are: Definitely Yes (5), Mostly Yes (4), Not Sure (3), Mostly No (2), Definitely No (1). Items marked R are scored the opposite way, i.e. 1 to 5.

1. Do you feel that you have usually been paid pretty much what you are worth?
2. Would you say that you were better off than average?
3. Do you often feel that it is impossible for you to make ends meet? R
4 Would you say that you generally are 'hard up'? R
5. Do you feel that you have had all the advantages you could reasonably expect in life?
6. Do you feel that most people about you seem to get things easier than you do? R

POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM

The above is the first paper I wrote about the working class authoritarianism theory. Although my findings were mixed, I did interpret them as favouring the view that working class people are at least conservative. In the light of later evidence on the question, however, I would stress that any such relationship is very much dependant on the measuring instruments used. I would now therefore be much less confident of any generalizations at all about working class ideology. Later findings on the topic are detailed in the articles listed below:

Ray, J.J. (1983) The workers are not authoritarian: Attitude and personality data from six countries. Sociology & Social Research, 67 (2), 166-189.

Ray, J.J. (1985) Using multiple class indicators to examine working class ideology. Personality & Individual Differences 6, 557-562.

Ray, J.J. (1991) The workers are not authoritarian: Rejoinder to Middendorp & Meloen. European J. Political Research, 20, 209-212.

Ray, J.J. & Furnham, A. (1984) Authoritarianism, conservatism and racism. Ethnic & Racial Studies 7, 406-412.

Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1983). The behavioral validity of some recent measures of authoritarianism. Journal of Social Psychology, 120, 91-99.

Rigby, K., Metzer, J.C. & Ray, J.J. (1986) Working class authoritarianism in England and Australia. Journal of Social Psychology 126, 261-262