The Behavioral Consequences of Political Tolerance

Effective and enduring democratic government requires broad public support for basic democratic orientations. Chief among these are political participation and political tolerance, which traditionally have been viewed as closely linked: virtually everyone agrees that democracy works best when people actively engage in political life and when they do not exclude others from doing the same. However, empirical evidence to date challenges the idea that political tolerance and civic engagement are positively, or even directly, related. \ud \ud What are the behavioral consequences of political tolerance? Using novel experiments that randomly assign subjects to tolerate the rights of groups they strongly dislike, this dissertation finds that political tolerance directly stimulates participation in specific modes of civic engagement. I argue that tolerance for political minorities is a highly unpopular position that orients citizens toward disagreement and dissent and reduces conflict aversion among the politically tolerant relative to the intolerant. Through this mechanism, upholding the rights of groups that society prefers to repress independently raises the likelihood of participation in social modes of action in which the risk of disagreement and conflict with other citizens is high (e.g. protests), but does little to facilitate individual modes of action in which disagreement and conflict are unlikely (e.g. voting). \ud \ud My evidence is based on two methodological innovations. First, I employ a “self-persuasion” experiment in which subjects develop original arguments to convince a discussion partner to either permit (tolerate) or ban (not tolerate) public demonstrations by the subject’s most disliked group. Second, I directly observe subjects’ post-test participation using overt measures of subjects’ political behavior rather than survey items to measure only their behavioral intentions. Tracing the effects of randomized tolerance on subjects’ overt political behavior reveals, in support of my hypotheses, that practicing tolerance directly stimulates collective-contentious activism (in this case, signing one’s name to a petition to challenge the status quo), but has no effect on individual action (i.e. making an anonymous donation). I further corroborate these findings by applying nonparametric matching techniques to cross-national survey data from the U.S. and Europe, and through cross-national survey experiments that test my model in the U.S. and Hungary.\u