8 - Becoming Tolerant? Short-Term Changes in South African Political Culture

Summary

Political analysts will long remember the decade of the 1990s as a period of intense change. Consider the recent political history of South Africa. During the 1990s, the old apartheid regime dissolved, democratic reform swept the land, the ANC consolidated its power, and the economy rode a roller coaster of change. South Africa is perhaps an extreme example, but fundamental change swept countries as diverse as Indonesia, Russia, and East Germany.

How do citizens cope with change in their political, social, and economic systems? Do they – and how do they – adjust their attitudes, change their values? Unfortunately, with few exceptions (e.g., Rohrschneider 1999), we know little about the processes of change at the level of the individual citizen. This is in part because change is difficult to study, requiring longitudinal, panel data and necessitating statistical techniques that can distinguish between true change and the ever-present and thundering noise of unreliability. Further, theories of attitude and value change are not well developed, especially theories predicting relatively short-term change within individuals. Consequently, we know more about how institutions evolve than we do about how individuals cope with and adjust to changing institutions and systems.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate attitude change within the South African mass public. For several reasons, our main concern is with political tolerance. Tolerance is of course a crucial element in the matrix of democratic values. But it is also the most paradoxical attitude in the set, since earlier research (e.g., Gibson 1995) has demonstrated that tolerance may be the most difficult democratic value to learn.