Measuring Political Tolerance and General Support for Pro-Civil Liberties Policies: Notes, Evidence, and Cautions

Much has been learned about why some citizens are tolerant and others are not. However, the subfield has not reached agreement as to how these attitudes ought to be measured, and at least three competing measurement approaches currently exist: (1) the fixed-group approach, championed by the General Social Survey; (2) the “least-liked” group approach, invented by Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus (1982); and (3) an approach focusing not on groups but on support for restrictive public policies (e.g., Davis 2007). Although a few measurement studies have been published, generally research in this subfield has shown little concern about how different dependent variables overlap (or do not overlap). Measurement issues thus stand as an important impediment to advancing our understanding of the causes and consequences of political intolerance. This article considers the connections between political intolerance and general support for civil liberties. Most generally, I discover that different measures seem to be measuring somewhat different constructs, and that researchers therefore should not assume that different aspects of tolerance and support for civil liberties are interchangeable. These findings have important substantive implications for democratic theory: general support for civil liberties seems to be a policy preference legitimately contested within democratic politics, whereas political intolerance is a form of exceptionalism in which the political freedoms of particular groups and ideologies are targeted.