Towards a More “European” Tolerance? Attitudes on Civil Liberties using the General Social Survey, 1996-2016

• In Event: 2229 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable #6

Abstract

Have Americans become more or less politically tolerant, defined as the willingness to extend civil liberties to groups which one dislikes, in the last 20 years? According to prior research, political tolerance has either stagnated since the 1970s (if to be tolerant one must be tolerant of every group in all circumstances) or it has steadily increased (if tolerance is measured separately by group, like by communists, racists, or gay men). Using General Social Survey cross-sectional and panel data on civil liberties, I propose a new framework: separating out the groups that can be said to constitute hate speech from those that are only controversial. The United States is unique among Western liberal democracies in not having a prohibition against hate speech, and by applying a hate speech framework to measuring political tolerance, I find that hate-speech-excluded tolerance has dramatically increased from 1996 to 2016. Meanwhile tolerance of hate speech groups has remained flat and even decreased among groups that historically were more tolerant of such groups, including liberals and the college educated. Still, going to college has a positive effect on political tolerance, although the effect for hate speech groups is roughly half of the effect on tolerance for all other groups. This ‘European’ framework toward measuring political tolerance suggests new trends and opportunities for inquiry.

Author

• Anna Boch, Stanford University