6 - The Persuasibility of Tolerance and Intolerance

Summary

The findings of the preceding chapters are not very encouraging for supporters of democratic tolerance. There is not much tolerance in South Africa, and intolerance is often directed at mainstream competitors for political power. Is effective political competition therefore doomed in South Africa?

Perhaps not. Perhaps there are ways in which intolerance can be converted to tolerance (or at least neutralized). After all, the answers people give us to questions during an interview are not necessarily immutable. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to determine whether South Africans can be “talked out of” their intolerance, whether they can be persuaded to adopt a more democratic position in disputes over civil liberties. This question of persuasibility is one that has attracted a variety of earlier inquiries from political psychologists.

THE MUTABILITY OF PUBLIC OPINION

Survey research is typically thought of as the art of providing respondents with stimuli that will provoke a report of the state of being of the person. Thus, when people are asked whether they approve of political groups, the traditional model envisages a process of recall: The respondent searches his or her memory to retrieve a thought that can serve as the basis for a reply. As Zaller and Feldman (1992, 579) characterize it, “The standard view is that when survey respondents say they favor X they are simply describing a pre-existing state of feeling favorably toward X.“

This tradition in survey research is well established and provides important information about the properties of people. But especially in transitional societies, the store of information and experience on which people can rely in formulating their answers is not necessarily broad or stable.