1. Koos, Agnes."Increasing tolerance or increasingly selective intolerance?" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Political Science Association, New Orleans, LA, Fairmont Hotel, Mar 23, 2005 Online <.PDF>. 2009-11-26 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p89008_index.html>
Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Review Method: Peer Reviewed Abstract: According to GSS, Americans showed a slightly decreasing tendency to deny the
political rights of five target groups during 1976-1998. Although practically we cannot
distinguish between a society in which people exercise tolerance because they are maximally
committed to civil liberties (are “absolute tolerant”), and a society in which no one hates
anybody to the extent of limiting their rights, for theory and predictions it makes sense to test
whether tolerance is a multivalent personality trait, or is situational and group-related (possibly
bringing about “pluralistic intolerance”). In a half-confirmatory and half-exploratory research, I
replicated Mondak and Sanders’s (2003) finding with the joint 1998 and 2000 GSS data. The
proportion of “absolute tolerants” is 21.23%, but the interpretation of this fact remains open to
discussion. First, there is a social desirability effect at work, and second, the “pluralistic
intolerance” hypothesis has also received support.
