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Does Intolerance Dampen Dissent? Macro-Tolerance and Protest in American Metropolitan Areas

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Abstract

Political tolerance has long been regarded as one of the most important democratic values because intolerant political cultures are believed to foster conformity and inhibit dissent. Although widely endorsed, this theory has rarely been investigated. Using multilevel regression with poststratification to measure levels of macro-tolerance in U.S. metropolitan areas, and event data to measure rates of protest, we test whether cultures of intolerance do indeed inhibit public expressions of dissent. We find that they do: levels of macro-tolerance are positively and strongly associated with higher rates of protest in American metropolitan areas. Our findings have implications for the study of political tolerance, for normative theories of free speech and other civil liberties, and for scholarship on protest and collective action.

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Notes

  1. MSAs are the counties adjacent to an urbanized core area of at least 50,000 people that have “a high degree of social and economic integration with the core as measured through commuting ties” (https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/gtc/gtc_cbsa.html, accessed 10/19/2017).

  2. MSAs are also an attractive unit of analysis for efforts to explain protest incidence inasmuch as the study of protest in the U.S.—if not also protest itself—has primarily been an urban preoccupation. Significant studies that use cities or metropolitan statistical areas as the units of analysis include Eisinger (1973), Okamoto (2003), Olzak and Shanahan (1996), Olzak, Shanahan, and McEneaney (1996), and Spilerman (1970).

  3. Using a one-way ANOVA, we find no statistically significant difference across survey years in micro-level political tolerance (F = 0.91, df = 4, p = 0.46). See below for the measurement of micro-tolerance.

  4. We suspect that GDELT incorrectly classifies news reports as describing a protest in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV MSA to a far greater degree than is the case for other MSAs. The reason is that foreign policy reporters occasionally refer to international interactions using national capitals, e.g., “Washington protested the actions of Teheran.” Such false positives affect only the nation’ capital among the MSAs and are likely responsible for a considerable proportion of the protests we counted as occurring between 2007 and 2011 using the GDELT data. Indeed, even after applying our filters to remove false positives, we count 1261 protest events per year in Washington DC MSA, compared with 306 per year in San Francisco, which is otherwise our most protest-prone MSA.

  5. Leemann and Wasserfallen (2017) point out that MRP can be conducted when one knows only the marginal distributions of demographic and geographic populations. To do so, one creates a simulated joint distribution under the assumption that the proportion of MSA residents who are, for example, aged over 65, is constant across the categories of the other demographic factor(s). Leeman and Wasserfallen show that this approach produces estimates as accurate as those obtained using classic MRP, especially if demographic factors are only weakly inter-correlated.

  6. Briefly, fixed-group measures of tolerance are those in which the questions refer to political groups selected by the researcher (e.g., Stouffer 1955). Least-liked measures allow the respondents themselves to identify the groups (e.g., Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus 1982). Support for civil liberties refers to attitudes about whether certain types of activities, irrespective of the groups involved, ought to be allowed (e.g., giving certain types of inflammatory speeches; see Davis 2007 and Gibson and Bingham 1985).

  7. Cronbach’s alpha for the entire set of eight items is 0.72, which indicates that even a simple summated index of the items would have adequate reliability.

  8. Ward et al. (2013) provide the illustration of international trade or currency “wars” that might be counted as conflict events.

  9. This is correlation is obtained using the “filtered” GDELT data; the method of filtering is described in the next paragraph. Using the raw, unfiltered GDELT protest counts, the correlation with the DCA counts is even higher, at 0.83.

  10. Indeed, we might expect that MSAs, being urban areas, exhibit more homogenous levels of media density than states, which vary greatly in their degree of urbanization. As such, newspaper based measures of protest incidence might in fact be more accurate at the MSA-level than the state-level.

  11. Offsets are variables included in regression models with coefficients fixed to a value of one. Doing so in this case allows the log of population to be moved to the left-hand side of the equation. In turn, this permits an interpretation of the model as one of (logged) rate of protest rather than protest incidence, which is arguably a more intuitive interpretation.

  12. We note that our results hold when (1) using the raw, unfiltered measure of protest incidence and (2) removing three MSAs that were influential outliers as defined by their Cook’s Distances. These results are reported in the Online Appendix.

  13. Of the three major micro-level predictors of political intolerance—support for democratic institutions and processes, psychological insecurity, and threat perceptions (Gibson 2006)—only threat perceptions seem likely to be much affected by environmental conditions, at least in the short-term. As Gibson and Gouws (2003) have noted, this means that finding an exogenous instrument by which change in political tolerance can be induced is more difficult than one might imagine.

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Funding

This research was made possible by a Grant from the National Science Foundation to Gibson (“Creating a State-Level Public Opinion Data Base for Law and Courts Scholarship: New Frontiers in Research on the Public’s Views of Third Branch Politics,” SES 1228619). The Freedom and Tolerance Surveys upon which this paper relies were funded by the Weidenbaum Center at Washington University in St. Louis. We greatly appreciate the support provided for this research by Steven S. Smith, Director of the Center. We also appreciate the thoughtful comments and suggestions provided by Adam Green, George Marcus, Lauren McLaren, David Muchlinski, Neil Munro, Niccole Pamphilis, Mark Peffley, Paul Sniderman, and Karen Wright on an earlier version of the paper. Replication materials are available on the Political Behavior Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OUAYYH).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK

    Christopher Claassen

  2. Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1063, St. Louis, MO, 63130-4899, USA

    James L. Gibson

  3. Centre for Comparative and International Politics, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    James L. Gibson

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Correspondence to Christopher Claassen.

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Claassen, C., Gibson, J.L. Does Intolerance Dampen Dissent? Macro-Tolerance and Protest in American Metropolitan Areas. Polit Behav 41, 165–185 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9444-x

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