Social Identities and Political Intolerance: Linkages within the South African Mass Public

Abstract

Social Identity Theory offers a useful understanding of the psychodynamics of affiliations with groups, while theories of political tolerance explain why some citizens are unwilling to tolerate their political enemies. Despite the obvious logical connection, little extant research has joined these two theories. We hypothesize that strong ingroup positive identities create strong outgroup negative identities, which are in turn connected to antipathy toward one's political opponents, perceptions that those opponents are threatening, and, ultimately, to political intolerance. We test these hypotheses using survey data from the South African mass public. Generally, nominal group membership is not the most significant variable; instead, attitudes toward group solidarity have a pervasive impact on all aspects of political intolerance. We also identify some significant predictors of threat perceptions among the social identity variables. We conclude by arguing that strong group identities pose a difficult challenge for the consolidation of democracy in South Africa. l outh Africa faces a host of impediments to the successful consolidation of its efforts at democratizing its political system. Grinding poverty, extreme inequality, the lost generation of young warriors against apartheid are some of the most pressing difficulties facing the new regime. Optimism about the future of democracy in South Africa is in short supply (e.g., Giliomee 1995). Among the impediments to democratic consolidation is the high degree of subcultural within South Africa. The country is divided, and deeply so, along a variety of racial, ethnic, and linguistic lines. Race is certainly central to South African politics, but intra-racial (or ethnic) divisions are terribly significant as well. Subcultural pluralism has often been found to be a major impediment to successful democratization (e.g., Dahl 1989; Bollen and Jackman 1985), and South Africa has an extreme case of such (e.g., Smooha and Hanf 1992; Horowitz 1991). One important consequence of subcultural is political intolerance. In deeply divided polities, people typically develop strong ingroup positive identities, often leading to strong outgroup animosities. This psychological division of the world into friends and foes can undermine tolerance. Thus, Social Identity Theory (SIT, see Tajfel 1978; Tajfel and Turner 1979) is a micro-level complement to macro-level theories about the role of cultural in the development of democratic institutions and processes. Cultural contributes to strong group identities, leading to an unwillingness to put up with one's political foes, which impedes the free