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INCREASING TOLERANCE OR INCREASINGLY SELECTIVE INTOLERANCE?
INTRODUCTION
The General Social Survey includes a battery of questions measuring the level of political
tolerance. It includes fifteen questions about five target groups (communists, atheists,
homosexuals, racists and militarists), asking whether these groups should benefit or not from
democratic rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of press. Researchers interested in the
tolerance levels of the American public found slightly decreasing inclination to deny these rights
during the period 1976 - 1998.
Yet, the results cannot be unambiguously interpreted as increasing political tolerance.
There are two main considerations warning about too optimistic interpretations.
First, an approach we may call “maximalist,” holds that there is only one really tolerant
score: allowing all groups all the three activities mentioned. In Mondak and Sanders’s (2003)
interpretation, this is a “pure 0” score, the only one measuring tolerance. All answers forbidding
at least one activity to any of the groups (thus scoring from 1 to 15 on their scale), are but
different levels of intolerance. Coding the “don’t know” answers also as intolerance, they found
that the proportion of completely tolerant answers increased very slightly, from about 15% in the
seventies to about 18% in 1998.
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Second, a “changing alignments” approach holds that decreasing levels of intolerance
originate in the fact that communists and atheists have become less feared during détente and
after the fall of the communist bloc. Thus, far from an increase of political tolerance (understood
as support for civil liberties), it is just an artifact behind the good news. The extended argument
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The 18% of absolute tolerants is given for the whole period of 1976-1998, no detailed scores
for years are reported.
Convention