The mechanisms behind the relationship between education and political tolerance

ABSTRACT

Based on the amount of confirmation that this finding has received, it is a truism to say that education promotes tolerance, whether political, racial, ethnic, religious, or tolerance of sexual minorities. There has also been a good deal of theorizing about why that is so. Yet, existing analyses tend to focus on single explanations and, therefore, raise red flags about their findings and cannot speak to the relative importance of different explanations. We need to identify the mechanisms responsible for the relationship between education and tolerance properly because it can strengthen our confidence that education is the cause and tolerance the effect. Using data from the 2014 General Social Survey, I simultaneously evaluate the relative roles of cognitive sophistication, authoritarianism, political interest, and faith in people in mediating the link between education and political tolerance. I also seek to determine whether education moderates the four pathways. The mediation analysis demonstrates that the effect of education on political tolerance is transmitted through all four mediators, with cognitive sophistication reigning supreme. The moderation analysis shows that the paths linking education and political tolerance are similar across all levels of education.

KEYWORDS:

• Political tolerance
• education
• cognitive sophistication
• authoritarianism
• political interest
• mediation

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Justin Aqwa and Sabrina Thelen of the Research Design and Analysis Unit (RDA) at Wayne State University for help with the statistical analysis reported in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Not counting a post-Sept 11 spate of work on the trade-offs between support for civil liberties and national security measures that threaten them.

2 While the bulk of scholarship on political tolerance concludes that education has a salutary influence on tolerance, dissenters from this view contend that the well-educated only appear more tolerant because they yield to social norms that prize tolerance and mouth off socially desirable responses to survey questions that measure it (e.g., Jackman 1978; Jackman and Muha 1984). Flying in the face of this argument, cross-national analyses of the impact of education on tolerance demonstrate that the well-educated tend to be more tolerant than the poorly educated even when the normative environment in which they live does not trigger socially desirable responding (Stenner 2005). Moreover, more direct tests of the possibility that the relationship between education and tolerance in the United States is confounded with socially desirable responding reject it (Heerwig and McCabe 2009). In short, the evidence is strongly on the side of the view that educational differences in tolerance are meaningful and not an artifact of socially desirable responding.

3 To be exact, Peffley and Sigelman call their measure “psychological inflexibility” although its wording makes it look like a measure of authoritarianism.

4 Seemingly undermining this proposition, an experiment that aims to examine a causal link between the learning of constitutional principles and support for civil liberties concludes that learning about civil liberties can increase awareness of constitutional rights and liberties but does not produce a corresponding increase in support for their application (Green et al. 2011). While situated in the general literature on the role of education in tolerance, however, this study examines the role of experimentally manipulated civics coursework rather than the totality of an educational experience on which the bulk of the studies to date have focused. As a result, this and other studies that examine the impact of civics education on tolerance (e.g., Avery et al. 1992) are orthogonal to the broader question about the impact of levels of education on tolerance and the role of political engagement in mediating it.

5 Although education’s influence works indirectly through its associations with conservatism and psychological security which influence norms support directly.