Making Tolerance Judgments: The Effects of Context, Local and National

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of political context on tolerance judgments. Using an experiment embedded within a representative sample of the South African mass public, we explore the impact of four contextual factors on tolerance judgments. Generally, we discover that the actual attributes of a civil liberties dispute have little or no impact on tolerance judgments. Rather, pre-existing threat perceptions strongly dominate perceptions of the context, rendering impotent the "facts" of the dispute itself. We speculate that these findings are largely a function of the intense political divisions in South Africa. Because inter-group animosities are so strong, objective situational factors matter little in deciding whether to tolerate a hated political enemy. Thus, we conclude that context does indeed matter for tolerance, but that in countries like South Africa, the intensity of political conflict is far more significant than the characteristics of individual civil liberties disputes.

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