Differential Associations of Authoritarian Submission and Traditionalism with Fake-News Detection and Conspiracy-Claim Endorsement: Evidence from Two Romanian Samples in the 2024-2025 Electoral Cycle.

Susceptibility to misinformation-related content threatens democratic processes, yet the roles of individual authoritarianism components remain understudied. We report two independent Romanian studies conducted during the 2024-2025 electoral cycle, examining associations of aggression, conventionalism/traditionalism, and submission/conservatism with two outcomes: accuracy in identifying false news (Study 1, N = 427, RWA-15) and endorsement of conspiracy claims drawn from Romanian electoral discourse (Study 2, N = 170, VSA-6). Adjusted regression models showed that authoritarian submission was the strongest negative correlate of false-news accuracy in Study 1 (β = -0.411, p < 0.001), whereas traditionalism was the strongest positive correlate of conspiracy-claim endorsement in Study 2 (β = 0.529, p < 0.001). Authoritarian aggression contributed modestly to conspiracy-claim endorsement (β = 0.178, p = 0.006) but did not independently predict false-news accuracy (β = -0.075, p = 0.130). A non-parametric bootstrap (10,000 resamples) supported the cross-study differences for the traditionalism/conventionalism and submission/conservatism contrasts (both p < 0.001), whereas the aggression contrast was not significant. Person-centred analyses in Study 2 were descriptively consistent with the regression results. Because instrument, sample, outcome, and period differed simultaneously, the cross-study contrasts are hypothesis-generating rather than evidence of a causal or construct-level dissociation. Moreover, VSA-6 subdimension analyses should be interpreted as exploratory because the scale was developed primarily to assess overall authoritarianism and the Romanian two-item aggression and conservatism pairs showed weak internal coherence.