Trends in Political Tolerance

Abstract

Some researchers find a substantial increase in political tolerance since the 1950s, while others find the increase to be illusory -the public is more tolerant now of leftists, but has simply found other targets on which to vent its intolerance. Reanalysis and the addition of more extensive trend data from 1940 to 1985 suggest that the shift does seem primarily to reflect increased tolerance of leftists, but that the public has not found other groups to be intolerant of. Measured tolerance has fluctuated greatly over the period, reflecting mainly changes in perceptions of threat from putatively subversive groups, especially domestic Communists. Also, the public's grasp of, and selfinterested concern about, civil liberties seems so minimal that one might argue not that the public is substantially tolerant or intolerant, but that it has no really tangibly measurable attitude on the subject one way or the other. Several recent studies have dealt with the American public's tolerance for dissent and nonconformity. Part of the discussion has revolved around the issue of changes in the level of tolerance-specifically, whether there has been an increase it; this quality since the 1950s. The benchmark for these studies has been Samuel A. Stouffer's classic study of civil liberties, published in 1955. Stouffer's survey posed an array of questions about Communists, Socialists, and atheists and sought to assess the public's willingness to allow such people to speak and to hold various kinds of jobs. Twenty years later, comparative data became available. In 1973, Stouffer's 1954 survey was substantially replicated, and, beginning in 1972, several of his central questions have been included on the General Social Survey of the National OpinJOHN MUELLER iS Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester. The author would like to thank J. Allen Williams, Tom Smith, and Howard Schuman for supplying some of the data used in this paper, Karl Mueller for research assistance, and George E. Marcus and John Zaller for comments on an earlier draft. Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 52:1-25 ? 1988 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press / 0033-362X/88/0052-01/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.27 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:15:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms