Crafting tolerance: the role of political institutions in a comparative perspective

Abstract

Ongoing changes in social structures, orientation, and value systems confront us with the growing necessity to address and understand transforming patterns of tolerance as well as specific aspects, such as social tolerance. Based on hierarchical analyses of the latest World Values Survey (2005-08) and national statistics for 28 countries, we assess both individual and contextual aspects that influence an individual's perception of different social groupings. Using a social tolerance index that captures personal attitudes toward these groupings, we present an institutional theory of social tolerance. Our results show that specific institutional qualities, which reduce status anxiety, such as inclusiveness, universality, and fairness, prevail over traditional socio-economic, societal, cultural, and democratic explanations.

Shaping tolerant attitudes towards immigrants: The role of welfare state expenditures

“…Eger (2010) as well as Mau and Burkhart (2009) already showed that rising levels of ethnic heterogeneity decrease welfare state solidarity. We thus argue that the assumed positive effect of welfare states on the formation of tolerance (Crepaz and Damron, 2009;Kirchner et al, 2011) may not hold for highly ethnic diverse countries. Following the approach by van Oorschot and Uunk (2007) who scrutinized the relationship between welfare state spending and the public's concern for immigrants, we extend their study by combing insights from the welfare state solidarity literature with evidence from tolerance research.…”

“…Previous studies have shown that institutional settings such as the welfare regime (e.g. Crepaz and Damron, 2009;Kirchner et al, 2011), the political system (e.g. Dunn et al, 2009;Peffley and Rohrschneider;Weldon, 2006) as well as economic factors (e.g.…”

“…In other words, as long as individuals see their own social status protected by the given institutional settings, tolerance will be affordable for them (Feldmann et al, 2000;Kirchner et al, 2011). On the contrary, if basic personal and social needs are not protected, individuals' will demand for personal selfexpression and the limitation of the rights for others (i.e.…”

School, friends, or a matter of personality?

“…Third, it is necessary to broaden the scope of the dependent variable considering other measures of tolerance. Although the measure used here is similar to other international studies (Kirchner et al, 2011), a study like this should ideally use a two-step measurement procedure to first establish that an individual has an objection toward a particular group, and second to measure the extent to which the individual supports or opposes that group.…”

“…Another way of measuring tolerance that has been used in the study reported here is to examine participants' explicit attitudes or the degree of their positive attitudes (Weldon, 2006;Kirchner, Freitag, & Rapp, 2011;Miklikowska, 2016). That approach is often used in psychological and sociological literature, in which tolerance relates to the appreciation and affirmation of diversity, pluralism, and difference-that is, the more positive aspect of the concept of tolerance.…”