Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

LITERATURE REVIEW:
The relationship between education and political tolerance has had an extensive history in research.
Various studies have been conducted on the relationship, and numerous distinct factors have shown to have
an impact on the relationship. These factors include nonconformist groups, cognitive sophistication, and
conceptualization of political tolerance.
One of the first research assessments performed on political tolerance was by Samuel Stouffer, and
it focused on nonconformist groups (Davis, 1975). Samuel Stouffer “studied tolerance of Communists,
atheists, and socialists in a 4,933-case national sample” (Davis, 1975) Stouffer investigated the “extent to
which Americans were prepared to extend procedural rights to communists and suspected communists”
(Sullivan, Pierson, & Marcus, 1979). Stouffer concluded from his data that “within each group the less
educated were less tolerant than the better educated” (Davis, 1975).
Another important factor to the relationship between education and political tolerance is cognitive
sophistication. Cognitive sophistication is defined, as sophistication of one’s reasoning process (Bobo &
Licari, 1989). A study was conducted by Lawrence Bobo and Fredrick Licari, on the influence of education
on political tolerance while emphasizing the effect of “cognitive sophistication” (1989). They developed a
measure for cognitive sophistication, by administrating a vocabulary test; they performed a regression that
included various civil liberties, and cognitive sophistication along with control variables such as age, gender,
income and political ideology (Bobo & Licari, 1989).
In their results they concluded that “the highly educated are more tolerant than the less well
educated… when the analysis is restricted to respondents who are likely to have negative attitudes toward
the target group” (Bobo & Licari, 1989). They also recognized in their results that, “sophistication accounts
for a substantial fraction of the effect of education on tolerance” (Bobo & Licari, 1989).
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