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(Nunn, Crockett, and Williams, 1978). Yet, recent work on political tolerance (Sullivan, Piereson, and
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Marcus, 1982) and on inrergroup attitudes and beliefs (Jackman, 1978; Jackman and Muha, 1984) has
questioned whether education encourages more enlightened and tolerant views. We are interested in better
understanding when and why increasing years of education may lead to a greater commitment to
democratic norms of tolerance.
15
2 Our first objective is to identify more precisely the underlying traits that higher levels of education are
frequently assumed to impart. One of the most prominent explanations for the positive relationship between
education and tolerance is the greater cognitive sophistication produced by more years of schooling. Few
20
investigations have employed direct measures of cognitive sophistication as predictors of tolerance. We test
for such effects in the analysis reported below.
3 Our second objective is to perform a stringent test of the education-tolerance relationship that takes
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into account feelings of approval or disapproval of the target group whose rights are in question. Recent
research on the appropriate definition and measurement of tolerance suggests that merely eliciting support
for a civil liberty may not reflect tolerance, since the group in question may be nonthreatening or even
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liked. Thus, we also examine the effect of education on tolerance when the group in question is opposed by
the respondent.
4 Excellent data for conducting this research are available. The 1984 General Social Survey included 15
35 questions on support for civil liberties (three parallel items on each of five nonconformist groups).
Importantly, this set of items compensates for weakness of some earlier studies of tolerance by including
questions on groups from the left and right ends of the political spectrum. A multiple-item measure of
40 cognitive sophistication is also available. In addition, for four of the five nonconformist groups there are
indicators of respondents' approval or disapproval of the target nonconformist group.
5 Below we review the claims that have been made for and against education as a source of greater
45 tolerance, emphasizing the importance of cognitive sophistication. We next place the concern with the
effects of education in the context of appropriate definition and measurement of tolerance. These discus-
sions formulate two hypotheses concerning education and tolerance which we then test empirically.
EDUCATION AND POLITICAL TOLERANCE
50 THE CASE FOR EDUCATION
6
Stouffer's work established that tolerance was higher among those living outside the South, those
living in urban as opposed to rural areas, those perceiving little threat from the target group, the
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nonreligious, men as opposed to women, elites more than the mass public, and the highly educated more
than those with less education. He expressed optimism that the overall level of tolerance would increase
over time, in part because of the increasing years of education younger cohorts were receiving. Nunn,
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Crockett, and William's (1978) replication study reported slightly stronger effects of education on tolerance
in 1973 than Srouffer had found in 1954. Nunn and colleagues stressed that increasing years of education
were part of a learning process that enhanced cognitive skills, cultural knowledge, and cognitive flexibility.
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In a similar vein, McClosky (1964) maintained that democratic values are complex ideas requiring
considerable education and social learning before they will he applied. Davis's (1975) analysis of change
noted education effects within each of the cohorts used in his analysis and a contribution by increasing
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levels of education of 4% to the overall change of 22% in tolerance between 1954 and 1971.
7
Others have argued that education also increases the consistency of application of general democratic
principles in concrete or more applied situations. For example, Prothro and Grigg (1960) found that support
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for abstract democratic norms
was very high and unaffected by education. But support for concrete
applications of those principles was much lower, with the highly educated exhibiting more consistency
than the less well educated. They interpreted these patterns as demonstrating that education provides
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«greater acquaintance with the logical implications of the broad democratic principles» (Prothro and Grigg,
1960:291). McClosky (1964) argued that education played a large part in the finding that his 'sample of
«political influentials» was more supportive of democratic ideology than the «mass electorate.» More