Development and Validation of a Novel Measure of Political Tolerance

• In Event: New Approaches to Measurement and Conceptualization

Abstract

Many of the challenges that political polarization in the United States creates for democracy have been analyzed through the prism of intergroup attitudes: as members of the left and the right are drawn into real and imagined conflicts between their respective social groups, evidence suggests they become increasingly open to a suite of hostile and oppositional behaviors that threaten a vicious cycle of conflict escalation. Scholars concerned with this phenomenon have often taken aim at understanding how negative affect predicts downstream anti-democratic behaviors, but recent research has neglected to study tolerance, or the degree to which individuals express restraint in the face of negative affect and how variation in that restraint may help paint a more comprehensive picture of the relationship between souring appraisals of outparty members and the likelihood of escalating conflict.

To advance research on tolerance, this paper discusses initial results from a validation study for a novel attitudinal measure of political tolerance, including a discussion of conceptual debates about how democratically-relevant tolerance should be understood and results from a pilot study of the measure among a population of U.S. adults to assess reliability, dimensionality, and predictive utility of the instrument. Results testify to the value of measuring tolerance as opposed to negative affect alone.

Author

• Eric Torres, Harvard University