Social Diversity and the Development of Political Tolerance

Advanced industrialized democracies have seen an increase in the ethnic and racial diversity of their populations, and the impact of this diversity for democratic politics has received increasing attention. In this paper, I examine the impact of increasing social diversity on young people's attitudes about speech rights in two countries: Canada and Belgium. In particular, this paper will examine how socially tolerant young people respond when asked to extend civil liberties to exclusionary groups, such as racists and skinheads. Drawing on a unique comparative dataset composed of close to 10,000 young people in these two countries, the results suggest that exposure to racial and ethnic diversity in one's social networks increases political intolerance of exclusionary speech. Importantly, this targeted intolerance does not seem to extend to other types of objectionable speech. In fact, exposure to racial and ethnic diversity has a positive effect on the political tolerance of other types of objectionable speech. A dual mechanism is proposed to explain these diversity results. The paper suggests that racial and ethnic diversity is a key reason for the development of a more multicultural form of tolerance among the youngest generation, which balances individual rights against concerns about social inclusion. The implications of these findings are then discussed in relationship to the larger literature on political tolerance. Paper presented at the Canadian Political Science Association annual meeting, held June 5-7, 2008 in Vancouver, BC. I would like to thank the American Association of University Women for their generous support of my doctoral research. I am also grateful to the principle investigators of the Comparative Youth Study (CYS), Dietlind Stolle and Marc Hooghe, for their collaboration in collecting the data used for this project. The Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Fonds Québecois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture, the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen’ and the Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds, K.U. Leuven all provided financial support for the data collection. Introduction The role of social diversity in explaining political tolerance is a neglected area of research. Little focused research has actually examined how living in more diverse settings impacts individuals’ tolerance judgments, despite a long tradition in social psychology of documenting how creating cooperative relationships between people from different backgrounds can decrease inter-group prejudice (Allport 1958). The key question examined in this paper is whether racial and ethnic diversity impacts the types of tolerance judgments an individual makes. I will argue that white youth with affective ties to people from racialized minorities will be more likely to ascribe to a more multicultural form of tolerance – one which makes distinctions between exclusionary forms of speech which are illegal in most Western democracies and other forms of objectionable speech. I will argue that exposure to racialized minorities fosters the types of target group distinctions that underpins multicultural tolerance. This paper will argue that social networks are a key, under-explored variable in understanding political tolerance judgments, especially when distinctions between exclusionary speech and other forms of speech are conceptualized into our understanding of civil liberties judgments. The paper begins with a synopsis of what is known about network effects and the types of relationships that one expects to find between network diversity and political tolerance. This review underpins the causal argument developed later that increased social diversity – especially racial and ethnic diversity – is an essential part of understanding why some young people draw the line at exclusionary speech. After outlining the composition of young people’s networks, we turn to an empirical exploration of how racial and ethnic diversity impacts political tolerance judgments among youth in Canada and Belgium using the Comparative Youth Study. Political Tolerance and Contact Tolerance is traditionally understood to imply restraint when confronted with a group or practice found objectionable (Heyd 1996; Mendus 1988, 1989; Horton and Nicholson 1992). Political tolerance typically refers to individual-level attitudes or institutional arrangements that permit groups to express opinions or maintain practices that a majority find objectionable (Stouffer 1963; Sullivan et al. 1979, 1982). Political tolerance thus refers to the willingness to refrain from preventing people (or groups of people) from expressing their disliked opinions,