Is the Tea Party libertarian, authoritarian, or something else?

Havercroft, Jonathan and Murphy, Justin (2018) Is the Tea Party libertarian, authoritarian, or something else? Social Science Quarterly, 99 (3), 1021-1037. (doi:10.1111/ssqu.12495).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Objective: Research on the Tea Party finds that both libertarian and authoritarian attitudes drive support for this movement, but political scientists lack a satisfactory explanation of this contradiction.
Methods: Factor analysis of nine attitudes from the 2012 American National Election Study is used to explore whether statism and moral traditionalism are intercorrelated on a dimension distinct from attitudes toward government; regression analysis is used to test if these distinct dimensions help to explain support for the Tea Party.
Results: Controlling for several competing explanations, the multiplicative interaction of anti‐government and morally statist ideological factors is shown to be a predictor of Tea Party support, especially among conservatives.
Conclusion: Our results suggest the Tea Party movement is in part driven by what Nietzsche called “misarchism,” an ideological mixture of moralism, statism, and libertarianism he first observed in Herbert Spencer.

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