Stability and Change

Ever since Stouffer began to measure political tolerance a half century ago, multiple studies have shown that a number of social, psychological, and political characteristics play a significant role in influencing whether individuals want to extend civil liberties to fringe groups. However, less is known about the stability of tolerance attitudes over an individual’s lifetime. To address this problem, our research draws on a national U.S. multiple-generation, four-wave panel study stretching from 1965 to 1997. The intuitive appeal of the approach used in this study is to advance theoretical accounts for variations in political intolerance irrespective of generational placement, life cycle, and differences in the political context. Specifically, the panel design encourages an effort to examine the relative impact of the social, political, and psychological predictors on intolerance over time and across the same individuals, and to assess the consequences of how changes in these determinants affect some of our most fundamental hypotheses about the origins of these attitudes.