(Originally posted to Politics at EraBlog on Sun, 27 Jul 2003 02:22:19 GMT)

I found an in­ter­est­ing piece about what makes a political con­ser­v­a­tive.

Four re­searchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of con­ser­vatism report that at the core of political con­ser­vatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psy­cho­log­i­cal factors linked to political con­ser­vatism include:

• Fear and aggression
• Dogmatism and in­tol­er­ance of ambiguity
• Un­cer­tain­ty avoidance
• Need for cognitive closure
• Terror management

This was linked to from the Dean Blog’s copy of Howard Dean’s July 25th speech, The President Has Misled Us.