Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa: Experiments in Democratic Persuasion.

By James L. Gibson and Amanda Gouws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 280p. $55.00.

American Jurist Learned Hand once reflected: “I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes…. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law no court can even do much to help it” (p. 4). The values that underpin political institutions in established democracies are often fragile. Yet a culture in which we accept that those with whom we fundamentally disagree have the right to speak and act politically provides an indispensable context for competitive democratic discourse and elections. Ironically, it is during periods of political transition, when the institutions are most fragile, that tolerance is both most important and least likely to be widely held. The South African case vividly demonstrates this paradox.

Although tolerance has been studied extensively in the United States and in a handful of other settings, James Gibson and Amanda Gouw's study of tolerance within newly democratic South Africa offers unique insight into the roots of tolerance and its fragility. The authors look at the many questions related to tolerance raised by South Africa's rapid attempt to democratize. They set out to investigate how South Africa's political culture impedes or promotes “development of democratic institutions and processes and the consolidation of democratic reform” (p. 4). They are interested not only in tolerance as it exists but also in how tolerance can change in this context: “to examine tolerance as it might become in South Africa” (p. 9).

The profile of South African tolerance as it exists is not encouraging. The authors outline the long and complex history of political violence and exclusion, which has contributed both to intolerance and to high levels of perceived threat among South Africans. They then investigate existing levels of tolerance. Applying the “least-liked” measures used in most tolerance research, the authors document that ordinary South Africans exhibit little tolerance at this relatively early stage of South Africa's postapartheid democracy; intolerant individuals outnumber tolerant individuals by at least three to one: “For most South Africans, the idea of putting up with their political enemies is distasteful and/or foreign…. Intolerance is not a sideshow in South African politics, as perhaps it is in more established and stable democracies; instead the main stage of politics is littered with intolerance” (p. 71). Perhaps more discouraging, this research shows that South Africans' intolerance is neither pluralistically distributed nor directed at extremist fringe groups, but is often aimed at mainstream competitors for political power.

Like most people, South Africans tend to translate perceptions of threat into intolerance. The authors employ social identity theory, a body of theory rarely integrated into discussions of political tolerance, to explore the ways in which people come to understand their relationship to the many racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups that compose South African society. This work offers some useful insights into the origins of threat perceptions and intolerance: “Group identity per se does not contribute to perceptions of threat, but among identifiers who believe in the necessity of internal conformity, the threat posed by the political enemies is perceived as more substantial ” (p. 92, emphasis in original). Thus, South Africans' intolerance is connected to attitudes about what they believe South Africa should look like and concern about other groups' ideas. These attitudes tend to be grounded in group identities that are somehow connected to a xenophobic view of those in other groups. The authors convincingly identify intolerance as the result of a social process, rather than an attribute of individual psychology.

Studies in other contexts have shown that intolerance can be converted to tolerance or at least neutralized. The authors attempt to investigate 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” (p. 119). They explore several theories of persuasion and test a variety of hypotheses about short-term attitude change. While other research has shown that manipulation of context affects levels of tolerance, the South African actual political context is so replete with violence that it supplants any context provided in the brief fabricated vignettes. Gibson and Gouws' findings do not paint an optimistic prospect for South African tolerance. Their attempts to manipulate tolerance (e.g., by exposing subjects to argumentation) reveal that although South Africans' tolerance can be manipulated, it is easier to encourage greater intolerance than to inspire increased tolerance.

Some of Gibson's previous work suggests that tolerance may be the most difficult democratic value to learn; other research contends that political culture changes very slowly (e.g., Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture, 1963; Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization, 1997). Gibson and Gouws investigate whether South Africans are gradually learning to be more tolerant by means of a panel study, extending over 18 months. Macrolevel data show little change in tolerance between 1996 and 1997, but on the individual level, 43% of South Africans changed their basic tolerance or intolerance. To explain these variations, the authors explore connections between economic and political perceptions and the principal predictors of political tolerance: threat perceptions, support for democratic institutions and processes, and psychological insecurity. One of their most important findings is that threat perceptions, which reflect historical experiences, are “more stable than is political tolerance itself” (p. 189) and are not for the most part sensitive to perceived changes in South African politics or the economy. Other findings are not as easy to report, in part because the dominant characteristics of tolerance vary considerably across the four racial groups (Africans, Whites, Coloureds, and Asians).

Gibson and Gouws have created a pathbreaking study of political tolerance in a new democracy. Their work sheds light on prospects for consolidation of South African democracy and of democracy in other states with violent histories and ethnic heterogeneity. It offers both fresh findings and questions for tolerance research, including issues about the value of least-liked group measures over time, the complexity of understanding tolerance in multiethnic societies, and the paramount role of threat perceptions in societies with a recent history of violence. Finally, Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa reminds us of the fragility of tolerance and the ease with which we can be persuaded to set it aside.