Songs and flags: Concern for Covid-19 and submission to authority

The literature on authoritarianism has shown that the perception of threat and social insecurity is connected to attitudes of submission to authority and a greater acceptance of freedom restraints. In the present research, the relationship between concerns for COVID-19 – measured in terms of the fear of personal and close to others exposure to COVID-19 – on authoritarianism was analysed in Italy while considering participants' basic values as a potential mediator. Results on 406 participants show high mean values on concerns for COVID-19 experienced during the lockdown phase. As hypothesized, such concerns are positively related to authoritarianism, and a mediation analysis showed that the link between these two variables can be explained by the relevance attributed to conservation values.