However, the stark authoritarian/democratic distinction is often misleading because authoritarian traits can be identified in democratic regimes. Examples of this include the McCarthyite ‘witch hunts’ of the 1950s in the USA and Thatcherism in the UK, whose combination of neo-liberal economics and neo-conservative social policies has been interpreted as a form of ‘authoritarian populism’ (hall and Jacques, 1983). Finally, authoritarianism has also been viewed as a psychological phenomenon linked to either a disposition to obey orders unthinkingly or a rigid insistence upon obedience from subordinates. The classic contribution to this approach to authoritarianism was the idea of the ‘authoritarian personality’ developed by Adorno et al. (1950), which explains unquestioning obedience and rigidity of character in terms of an ‘extreme intolerance to ambiguity’; in other words, it is a response to deep insecurities precipitated be uncertainty and choice