Strangers in Your Town: How Considerations of Potential Power Influence Judgments about Civil Liberties for Disliked Groups

AbstractThough Americans are socialized to support extensive civil liberties, prior research has shown that even one encounter with certain types of information about a disliked group may lead to significant decreases in citizens' willingness to be politically tolerant (Marcus, Sullivan, Theiss-Morse and Wood 1995). One category of information that has been examined briefly in the literature (and, perhaps, prematurely discounted) is information suggesting that a disliked group may gain traction for its beliefs or successfully implement its ideas. Prior research hypothesizes that such information may lead to decreased tolerance because it causes individuals to revise their estimates of the actual threat posed by a group espousing upsetting or non-mainstream ideas. Results from a survey-experiment demonstrate that citizen decisions regarding the proper scope of civil liberties are influenced by this type of information, suggesting that pragmatic calculations about probability of power may be useful additions to models of political tolerance.IntroductionSince 2010, a non-trivial amount of public attention has been focused on the fight over the planned Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a town approximately 30 miles outside of Nashville. The controversy was sparked in 2010 after the Islamic Center sought and received permission to build a 52,000 square foot mosque on land owned by the group (Blackburn 2010). This decision has resulted in protests, lawsuits, and even an alleged act of arson with the goal of halting the mosque's construction, despite the fact that the group has operated a smaller mosque in the town for more than two decades without incident (Berkey 2010). Further, one recent U.S. presidential candidate, Herman Cain, even went so far as to argue that the mosque is dangerous to the community during his campaign (Burns 201 1). His rationale for this position was that the mosque's construction would encourage the spread of Sharia law, a system of Muslim principles and rulings from religious scholars that many view as threatening to existing American law (Burns 201 1). 1 In fact, a number of state and local candidates have also adopted this position on the mosque's construction and, at a recent community meeting, it was reported that all public comments on the topic argued against expanding the mosque, with no comments offered in support of its construction (Blackburn 2010, Burns 201 1). For scholars, the unfolding controversy in Murfreesboro, Tennessee implicates the study of what has been termed "political tolerance" or the willingness of Americans in the majority to allow those who hold either non-mainstream or potentially offensive beliefs to exercise the same civil liberties as are guaranteed to other individuals in the United States (Stouffer 1955). Of course, in the case of the Tennessee mosque, it is certainly possible that some of the protesters hold non-religious objections to the site (such as concerns over increasing traffic and the like), but it is also difficult to deny that many of those who oppose the mosque do so on the grounds that it is a house of worship being built by Muslims. Yet, the Tennessee mosque provides only one relevant example. Across numerous contexts, political tolerance dilemmas have been of longstanding interest to researchers because, in a heterogeneous society such as the United States, core values like equality and extensive personal freedom necessarily rest upon the willingness of citizens to "tolerate" others with conflicting beliefs, opinions, or lifestyles (Sullivan, Piereson and Marcus 1982). Over nearly six decades, researchers have conducted extensive investigations of the types of individual characteristics associated with political tolerance, the mental processes involved in tolerant decisions, and even the types of information that may influence decision making about the proper scope of rights (Davis 1975, Gibson 1987, Lawrence 1976, McClosky 1964, McClosky and Brill 1983, McClosky and Zaller 1984, Nunn, Crockett and Williams 1978, Prothro and Grigg 1963, Sniderman et al. …