Download The Impact of Tolerance on Political Behavior

The Impact of Tolerance on Political Behavior
By
Alan Arwine
The University of Kansas
and
Lawrence Mayer
Texas Tech University
Presented at the Western Political Science Association
2012 Annual Meeting
Portland, Oregon , March 22 – 24, 2012
The Impact of Tolerance on Political Behavior
By
Alan Arwine and Lawrence Mayer
Abstract: The importance of the concept of tolerance for the successful operation
of a democratic political system is evident by the large and growing literature
treating aspects of it. Much of the earlier work on tolerance either focused on
defining the concept and describing trends in the level of tolerance or in identifying
whole system attributes that cause variation in that concept. This paper seeks to
explain the effects of tolerance in a society, accounting for both individual and state
political behavior. We find that as the level of tolerance in a state increases, the
country’s respect for human rights also increases. We also find that as an
individual’s level of tolerance increase, so too do their support for democratic
government, interest in politics, and rejection of authoritarianism, among other
behaviors.
The importance of the concept of tolerance for the successful operation of a democratic
political system is evident by the large and growing literature treating aspects of it. In this paper,
tolerance means the acceptance or legitimacy of people of a different race, ethnicity, religion, or of
a different social or political perspective. A segment of this literature is focused on measuring the
extent of tolerance in a specified population and trends in the level of tolerance in that population.
Stouffer, for example, finds a surprising degree of intolerance of political differences in the U.S. in
the 1950s, surprising because the U.S. has been regarded by conventional wisdom as the epitome
of a liberal democratic culture supporting one of the world’s most effective and responsive
democracies (Stouffer, 1955).
Mueller finds that as America emerged from the McCarthy era of the 1950s, tolerance
toward the political left increased (Mueller, 1988). Sullivan, Pierson, and Marcus, however, argue
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that rather than indicate an overall increase in the level of tolerance in the U.S., the Mueller data
merely reflect a transfer of intolerance to other groups (Sullivan, Pierson and Marcus, 1982). Thus,
the extent or level of tolerance may vary with respect to its object. A question addressed in this
paper is whether bigotry or intolerance is object specific. The foregoing literature, however, does
not to explain the variation in levels of tolerance – or its converse, intolerance -- either within the
U.S. or globally across nations.
Arwine and Mayer take an early step toward an explanatory focus on the concept of tolerance
in measuring the degree of tolerance in two political systems before and after experiencing perceived
existential threats to their way of life: France that suffered riots in 2005 that were concentrated in
a Muslim population that was isolated and alienated from French society while the Netherlands
experienced two high profile assassinations and a declared intent to assassinate public figures known
for their hostility to that nation’s Muslim community (Arwine and Mayer, 2009). In these studies,
the level of tolerance is measured by the question of whether the respondent would object to a
member of a frequently rejected out-group being one’s neighbor. The finding that the aggregate
levels of intolerance increased significantly in the two countries after experiencing the events in
question was the basis for inferring that a perception of one’s way of life being under an existential
threat may cause a weakening one’s commitment to such civil liberties values as tolerance of
opposing socio-political values. The inferred conclusion suggests that it is easier to be tolerant of
different groups or socio-political perspectives when those differences are not perceived as
threatening one’s own fundamental values, when tolerance does not seem to carry a cost. This
aggregate model of explaining tolerance relies, however, suffers from the weakness of inferring a
widespread perception from events, a version of the ecological fallacy. That study constituted an
effort to move from the description of trends and patterns in the level of tolerance to explaining the
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variation in that concept using tolerance as a dependent variable. That study was an attempt to
explain variation in the level at the aggregate level.
The next step in explaining the variation in levels of tolerance was to move from the
aggregate model, based as it is on an uncertain inference, to seeking an individual level explanation
of the variation in levels of tolerance. This model escapes the problem of that tenuous inference by
directly measuring attitudes held by individuals. Arwine and Mayer therefore take an array of
individual level attributes such as religion, religiosity, socio-economic class, a sense of economic
well-being, and educational attainment and regress them onto measures of antipathy towards outgroups. Using a structural equation model, they were able to explain 42% of the variation in their
dependent variable, levels of tolerance (Arwine and Mayer, 2010).
The foregoing two studies have in common the goal of treating tolerance as a dependent
variable to be explained by a variety of other factors. Yet, tolerance assumes its importance in
political analysis because we expect it to underlie factors, events, and behaviors that lead to such
goals as effective and responsive democratic government or behaviors that threaten such goals as
votes for extreme, racist, or anti-system parties. Attempts to explain such threatening behaviors as
support for such radical parties or movements have been frequently related to easily obtained system
level factors as a rise in unemployment or an increase in the level of immigration of unassimilated
populations (Givens, 2002 and Karapin, 2002). Such aggregate level explanation suffers from the
ecological fallacy as did the aggregate explanation of the first Arwine and Mayer model discussed
above. The people that are concerned with such system level facts may not necessarily be the same
ones that contribute most strongly with an aggregate score of intolerance.
This paper therefore proposes to relate the variation in levels of tolerance among individuals
to such dysfunctional behavior as had previously been explained by aggregate level data rather than
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inferring the actual attitudes in question from behaviors. For example, what is the relationship
between intolerance and actual votes for extremist parties or support for extremist movements? Of
course, the validity of a proposition on that question depends upon how one defines the categories
extremist or radical parties (Ignazi Piero, 2002). A fundamental question in this regard is whether
radical or extremist are discrete categories (a party is radical or is not) or is the phenomenon of
intolerance a matter of more or less rather than either-or. For example, does a party focus on
regional or sub-culture identification automatically classify it as radical? Is there a significant
distinction between a party seeking to secede from the state to which it belongs and a party merely
seeking greater autonomy from their state? Do, therefore, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang and Italy’s
Lega Nord belong in the same category? Extremism may refer to treatment of ethnic, racial, or other
minorities or it may refer to a policy agenda such trying to enact a collectivist economic regime in
a formerly capitalist country. It may also refer to a foreign policy agenda such as the vigorous
pursuit of the national interest with the use of military or other force in what had been a pacifist
society. For the purpose of this paper, we classify a party as extremist if it seeks to transform the
fundamental structure of the political system of which it is a part. Thus, Canada’s Bloc Québécois
in seeking actual secession from the Canadian federation would be classified as extremist despite
the fact that its economic agenda is leftist; yet, to the extent that it merely seeks greater autonomy
for the Northern provinces, Italy’s Lega Nord, whose supporters primarily seek greater autonomy
within the Italian nation state, would not be so classified. Similarly, a party with an overtly racist
agenda in a liberal democracy such as the British National Party is regarded as extremist.
A related possible effect of the level of tolerance (or its converse concept, intolerance) is the
propensity to engage in violent behavior, especially violence perpetrated against social or political
objects. Thus, we hypothesize that nations with lower aggregate tolerance scores will experience
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greater levels of social or political violence or more extremist politics.
Are intolerant individuals more active and passionate about socio-economic and political
issues and are thus more likely to participate in such issues than their more tolerant counterparts?
One might expect intolerant people to be less apathetic because differences among people assume
a greater salience for them. Our hypothesis here is that Individuals with lower tolerance score will
have a higher level of political activity and interest. Here again questions of definition must be
addressed. Variable 95 of the World Values survey, one of our two main sources, asks for the level
of the respondent’s interest in politics while variable 96 asks about actual political activity in which
the respondent engaged. The lower score on these variables indicates a greater likelihood to
participate; hence, we expect an inverse relationship between the tolerance score and the likelihood
to participate. The former of these variables is concerned with a psychological disposition to engage
in political activity while the latter is concerned with actual behavior for whatever reason. One may,
for example, sign a petition without thinking very much about it. Is activism a more or less
phenomenon or is it an either-or phenomenon? How are different modes of activity to be weighted?
Are intolerant people more ideological and rigid in their views compared to their more
tolerant counterparts? One might certainly expect intolerant individuals to exhibit a greater degree
of closed mindedness (Rokeach, 1960) which is almost the essence of intolerance. Unfortunately,
the data set does not directly address the factor of open or closed mindedness. However, the data
do address the question of whether the respondent has an authoritarian bent by preferring either a
strong leader or religious authorities to make the “correct” policy decisions over the democratic
process in which format for making policy and choosing policy makers is more important than the
content of the policy in question. Tolerance, after all, implies acceptance of policies or values with
which you disagree and of the people who promote these policies or values. The authoritarian or
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religious orientation implies a certainty that one has the correct values and is therefore not open to
alternative values or courses of action (variables 148-151 and 153). Our hypothesis here is that
intolerance is positively correlated with a distrust of people and a distrust of popular decision
making. Thus, democracy implies an acceptance of competition for public office and the right to
shape policy. We expect, therefore, that our measure of tolerance will be positively related to the
selection of democracy as the preferred political format while intolerance will be positively related
to the professed need for a strong leader to run things. This means accepting the legitimacy of racial,
ethnic, or religious groups other than one’s own to compete for such office or power and the right
of others to promote and values with which one disagrees to engage in and sometimes win such
political competition. Therefore, tolerant people will place a greater value on democracy, to regard
a democratic format as important to them. This variable specifically appears in the World Values
data (V162). Thus, intolerant people prefer a world guided by and committed to a single set of
values and dominated by people who are ethnically like them. We therefore relate tolerance to a
preference for ethnic diversity (V221).
Related to the closed mindedness question is the question of whether an intolerant person
is more likely to seek the institutional support of a religion that claims a monopoly on truth.
However, in our increasingly secularized society, religious institutions increasingly accept or
tolerate other religions. For example, Pope John Paul II even held that Judaism is an equally valid
alternative path to God which would seem to transform the two millenniums relationship between
those faiths (Caroll, 2001). Hence we would expect a positive but weak relationship between
intolerance and the affiliation with a major religion or the level of religiosity (measured by
frequency of attending religious services). However, this relationship may be reciprocal. Intolerance
and religiosity may be both cause and effect of one another.
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These data can be found in the latest round of the World Values Survey (2008). Specifically,
to measure tolerance for each respondent directly we rely on a set of questions as to whether the
respondent would object to having a certain type of individual as neighbors. These types of
individuals are comprised of those groups of people that have frequently been the object of prejudice
in the Western world: homosexuals, foreigners, unmarried couples, drug addicts, people with
HIV/AIDS, people who speak a different language, have a different religion or are a different race.
We derive individual tolerance scores from a weighted average of their responses to the neighbors
questions described above. We derive a national tolerance score from the average of individual
tolerance scores.
Beyond that, still using tolerance as the independent variable, we will move back to the
aggregate levels of analysis relating aggregate scores of tolerance to aggregate scores on the
Cingranelli and Richards’ Human Rights Dataset. A society may be classified according to its record
on affording political equality and protecting the rights of all of its citizens. Among those rights is
a “Physical Integrity Rights Index” which is computed from four indicators: Torture, Extra judicial
killings, Political imprisonment, and Disappearance with scores ranging from 0 (no respect for those
rights) to 8 (full government respect for these rights). Another such right in this data set is what they
call “The Empowerment Rights Index” constructed from indicators for Freedom of Movement,
Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly and Association, Workers’ Rights, Political Participation,
and Freedom of Religion. Scores for this index range from 0 (no government respect for these
rights) to 14 (full government respect for these seven rights in which the scores range from 0 to two
for each of them).
The Cingranelli and Richards dataset distinguishes women’s economic rights from women’s
political rights and women’s social rights. The economic rights include equal pay for equal work,
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free choice of which job or profession to pursue, equality in hiring and promotion practices, job
security, non-discrimination by employers, freedom from sexual harassment, the right to work at
night, the right to work in occupations considered dangerous, and the right to work in the military
or police force. Political rights include the right to vote, the right to run for political office, the right
to hold elected and appointed government positions, the right to join political parties, and the right
to petition government officials. The social rights include the right to equal inheritance, the right to
enter marriage on the basis of equality, the right to travel abroad, the right to obtain a passport, the
right to confer citizenship to husband or child, the right to initiate divorce, the right to own, acquire,
manage, and retain property brought in to the marriage, the right to participate in social, cultural,
and community activities, the right to an education, the freedom to choose a domicile, freedom from
female genital mutilation or forced sterilization. Each of the three rights is scored from 0 to 3 with
the higher number indicating greater respect for these rights. We compute an aggregate women’s
rights score by summing these three rights scales into a single 9-point scale. Our expectation here
is that the higher a nation’s tolerance score, the greater that country’s respect of woman’s rights.
The obvious but untested expectation is that countries that have a higher score on our
tolerance index will score higher on human rights. Each country’s tolerance score will be calculated
from the bigotry scores for each individual respondent in the political system. The bigotry score for
each individual will be a weighted mean score on the “neighbors” questions. Respondents who are
also members of one of the aforementioned out-groups will, of course, have no objection to having
another member of that group as a neighbor. However, such individuals may more strongly object
to having members of another out- group as neighbors as might be the case, for example, with
people of a different religion. Repressive regimes will therefore have higher aggregate levels of
intolerance. In other words the inference is that intolerant attitudes will produce intolerant behaviors.
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We code the tolerance variable so that a higher score means greater tolerance. Hence, the hypothesis
is as follows: Nations or individuals with a lower score on tolerance will have a lower score on our
measure of human rights. Thus, we assert that individuals can be more or less tolerant regardless
of the context in which they live and that the aggregate political culture of a nation be classified as
more or less tolerant. Both forms of tolerance impact upon how different groups or on-dominant
ideas and values will be treated.
Data Analysis and Findings: Participation and Violence
Our inquiry into the impact of tolerance as a whole system variable on the level of political
violence, extra constitutional protest, and the standing of extremist politics is seriously limited by
the classic small N limitation on inference using the comparative method (Hall, 2009). Nevertheless,
a glance at the whole system tolerance score for each of the ten nations for which we have the
necessary data reported in Table 1 shows two of the nations have a distinctly lower tolerance scores
than the others – France and Turkey.
France has suffered extreme regime instability in the two centuries following the Revolution
of 1789 with twelve extra constitutional regime changes not to mention the unsuccessful attempts
to overthrow the regime. While the current Fifth Republic has been free of such assaults, occasional
resorts to a general strike as in “The Events of 1968” and the Muslim riots of 2005 shows that the
ghost of George Sorel is still alive in the French culture (Sorel, 1950).
Turkey has not experienced the romanticizing of violence part of the “barricade tradition”,
embedded in the French culture; however, it has experienced political and religious oppression
before and after the Ataturk era. Moreover, religion plays a large role in Turkey compared to the
relatively secularized Western democracies and religion can be a force for mobilizing and
exacerbating divisions among peoples. The tolerance scores for ten mostly Western democratic
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countries are shown in Table 1. These scores are calculated from the individual scores in that
country. 0 = no tolerance; 100 = the highest level of tolerance.
Table 1: Tolerance Scores from Ten Countries
Country
Australia
Canada
France
Germany
Italy
Norway
Spain
Sweden
Turkey
The United States
Year
2005
2006
2007
2006
2005
2007
2007
2006
2007
2008
Tolerance Score
80.1
84.7
68.1
82.4
78.6
89.0
85.8
88.5
45.3
78.4
Intolerance is an activist phenomenon. One has to be aware of and to some extent involved
with something in order to develop an active dislike for it. Tolerance, therefore, should be
negatively related to political activity. To be intolerant of other racial, religious, or ethnic groups,
one would take action to limit a real or imagined impact on one’s life. The clearest indicator of that
kind of political awareness is a variable regarding the respondent’s interest in politics. Accordingly,
we calculated the standard regression weights between tolerance and their interest in politics and
found statistically significant negative relationships.
Furthermore, we expected that a tolerant subject would be more comfortable with ethnic
diversity than a less tolerant one. On a variable that places the respondent between declaring that
ethnic diversity “erodes unity” in their society to declaring that ethnic diversity “enriches life” in
their society using again our standardized regression weights, we found a modest but highly
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significant relationship with the level of tolerance. We also calculated the standardized regression
weight between tolerance scores and religiosity. We expect a negative relationship that is probably
reciprocal. Because traditional religions often claim that they have a possession of absolute truth,
toleration of heresy makes no sense. Thus, such religious perspectives would not give legitimacy
to other perspectives and religiosity would thus promote intolerance. However, intolerance may be
reinforced with traditional religiosity.
Since intolerant people do not trust their fellow man, they would be less supported of a
democratic form of government in which power theoretically resides with the people. As expected,
we found a modest negative correlation between tolerance and the need for a strong leader.
The model is illustrated in Figure 1 and the results are displayed in Table 2.
Table 2: The Impact of Tolerance on Selected Indicators Using Regression. Independent Variable: Tolerance
Dependent Variables
interest in politics (v95)
would sign petition (v96)
need strong leader (v148)
experts make decisions (v149)
importance of army rule (v150)
favors democratic system (v151)
religious authorities interpret law (v153)
prefers living in a democracy (v162)
religiosity (v186)
ethnic diversity (v221)
Standardized
Regression
W eight
-0.209
-0.412
0.393
0.268
0.430
-0.226
-0.398
0.201
0.198
0.204
Standard
Error
0.065
0.060
0.077
0.072
0.060
0.050
0.197
0.112
0.143
0.175
Intercept
Squared
M ultiple
Correlation
2.538
1.644
3.117
2.585
3.497
1.525
2.935
8.985
4.734
6.504
0.044
0.169
0.154
0.072
0.185
0.051
0.158
0.040
0.039
0.042
Every score is significant at better than the 0.001 level. Model Fit: RMSEA = 0.099.
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Figure 1:
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Tolerance and Civil Liberties
Tolerance refers to the unwillingness to accept an attribute of significant others. Civil
Liberties as in the Cingranelli and Richardsdata set refers to the rights granted by the government
to act or express oneself as one chooses without interference or punishment from the government.
It is possible, therefore, for civil liberties to be imposed on a political system while individuals in
that system hold bigoted or negative attitudes toward individuals in one or more other groups. The
American Deep South at the onset of the civil rights movement is a case in point. It is our
expectation, however, that a greater degree of tolerance in a society will promote respect for a
greater degree of civil liberties. A political system and its elites are more likely to grant and respect
rights of those whom one does not actively dislike.
However, the practice of protecting and implementing the equal protection of the law would
integrate a society and bring about an interaction of significant racial, ethnic, and other significant
segments of the population and break down negative stereotypes thereby reducing intolerance.
Hence, the relationship between tolerance and civil liberties is probably reciprocal. As we expected,
our regression analysis in fact reveals that an increase in the level of tolerance score for a state that
runs from 1 to a possible 100 points) is associated with an increase in an increase in that state’s
respect for the rights in the data set in the three categories described above: physical rights,
empowerment rights and women’s rights. The three women’s rights are combined in one variable.
However, the regression weights for the physical rights and women’s rights are weaker than for
rights in the empowerment category. Clearly, one may hold negative attitudes toward an out-group
without seeking to torture or physically abuse them. Similarly, one could be willing to live among
women as one’s neighbor (our indicator of a tolerant attitude) while holding sexist attitudes about
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the proper role of women in one’s society, hence, the positive but modest regression weights for
those two categories. The regression scores for the relationship between countries with the Civil
Liberties data set are shown in Table 3. Given the small N of ten, significance scores are not
reported. However, a linear regression of the tolerance scores and the three consolidated categories
of civil rights from the Cingranelli and Richardson data set produced the following r2 results: 0.389
for physical rights, 0.54 for women’s rights, and 0.685 for empowerment rights. Hence, the data
clearly confirm our hypothesis that the variation in our indicator of tolerance drives the variation in
civil rights. The regression lines are shown in Figures 2, 3, and 4.
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Figure 2: Tolerance vs. Empowerment Rights
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Figure 3: Tolerance vs. Physical Rights
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Figure 4: Tolerance vs. Women’s Rights
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Table 3: Impact of Tolerance on Upholding Civil Liberties
Right
Physical
Empowerment
Women
Regresison
Weight
0.081
0.147
0.072
Standard
Error
0.034
0.033
0.022
R2
0.389
0.685
0.547
Summary and Conclusions:
This paper has moved from our earlier work that purported to explain the variation in
tolerance at the individual and group levels to taking tolerance as an independent variable. It has
been a matter of conventional wisdom to assume that tolerance of other races, ethnicities, sex or
lifestyle supports the effective and responsive of a democratic political system. This paper has
attempted to go beyond conventional wisdom by examining the actual effect of tolerant attitudes on
various other attitudes and behaviors that are assumed to be relevant to the responsive and effective
functioning of a political system.
The data at our disposal did not permit an examination of the impact of intolerance on a
propensity to perpetrate violence; however, the data did confirm our related expectation that
intolerance promotes a greater level of political activity. The relationship between the tolerance
score for each state and their civil liberties score supports the expectation that a higher level of
tolerance is supportive of a more open and responsive democracy; however, it is impossible to set
precise threshold levels of tolerance required to produce that result.
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References
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