Political Tolerance, Racist Speech, and

the Influence of Social Networks n

Allison Harell, Universite´ du Que´bec a` Montre´al

Objective. This study examines the influence of ethnic and racial network diversity
on young people’s attitudes about speech rights in Canada by examining the impact
of diversity on racist groups’ speech compared to other objectionable speech. Meth-
ods. After reviewing prior work on diversity and political tolerance judgments, the
study presents multinomial logistic regressions to assess the impact of network
diversity on three types of political tolerance dispositions. The data are drawn from
the Canadian Youth Study, a sample of 10th- and 11th-grade students in Quebec
and Ontario (N 5 3,334). Results. The analysis suggests that exposure to racial
and ethnic diversity in one’s social networks decreases political tolerance of racist
speech while simultaneously having a positive effect on political tolerance of other
types of objectionable speech. Conclusions. The dual effects arguably represent an
evolving norm of multicultural political tolerance, in which citizens endorse legal
limits on racist speech. Future work should assess the extent to which target group
distinctions in political tolerance judgments have evolved over time and across age
cohorts.

Political tolerance refers to a willingness to allow disliked opinions, life-

styles, preferences, or worldviews to be expressed publicly by others
(Stouffer, 1963; Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus, 1979, 1982). In recent
years, many advanced industrialized democracies have struggled with how to
balance rights to free speech with laws that are intended to prevent mass
intolerance of minority groups. Holocaust denial laws, for example, restrict
people’s right to publicly challenge the occurrence or nature of the mass
genocide of Jews in Europe during World War II. Holocaust denial is a
crime in a number of Western democracies, including Belgium, France, and
Germany, and is limited in other countries by broader hate speech legis-

n
Direct correspondence to Allison Harell, Département de science politique, Université du
Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succ. Centre Ville, Montréal, QC (Canada) H3C 3P8
hharell.allison@uqam.cai. The author will share data and coding information with those
wishing to replicate the study. The author is grateful to the principal investigator of the
Canadian Youth Study, Dietlind Stolle, for her collaboration in collecting the data used for
this project, as well as to Blake Andrew, Antje Ellerman, Elisabeth Gidengil, Jon Hurwitz,
Stuart Soroka, and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments provided on earlier drafts.
The Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Fonds Québécois de
la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC) provided financial support for the data
collection, and the American Association of University Women provided funding to the
author.

SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 91, Number 3, September 2010

r 2010 by the Southwestern Social Science Association
Political Tolerance, Racist Speech, and Social Networks 725
lation, such as in Canada and the United Kingdom (Boyle, 2001; Douglas-
Scott, 1999; Coliver, Boyle, and D’Souza, 1992).
The enforcement of such legislation is often highly contested, but the
widespread presence of such restrictions shows that democratic states can
(and do) set limits on speech. Political tolerance research provides a wealth
of evidence on the sources of political intolerance (for a review, see Sullivan
and Transue, 1999), yet it remains unclear whether support for legally
backed forms of censorship aimed at reducing hate speech have the same
foundations as politically intolerant dispositions more generally. In other
words, it is unclear whether some people make a principled distinction
between hate speech and other speech they find objectionable.
Social scientists are only beginning to make sense of the ways people’s
actual experiences with social diversity influence their attitudes toward racist
speech. Despite increased interest in the past 15 years into the effect of social
networks on political behavior and attitudes, little research has focused on
social network composition and the types of attitudes people hold toward
democratic rights. A long tradition in social psychology documents how
creating cooperative relationships between people from different back-
grounds can decrease intergroup prejudice (Allport, 1958), yet little effort
has been made to see how diverse contact influences individuals’ political
tolerance judgments (see, however, Mutz, 2002, 2006; Cigler and Joslyn,
2002). This article suggests that social networks are a key, underexplored
variable for understanding political tolerance judgments, especially when
distinctions between racist speech and other forms of speech are concep-
tualized into our understanding of civil liberties judgments.
How does racial and ethnic diversity affect the limits that individuals place
on speech rights? The hypothesis tested here is that white youth with affec-
tive ties to racial minorities will be more likely to ascribe to a multicultural
form of tolerance—one that makes distinctions between exclusionary forms
of speech, which are illegal in most Western democracies, and other forms of
objectionable speech. The analysis is based on a unique youth data set, the
Canadian Youth Study (CANYS), which includes detailed social network
information (Stolle et al., 2006). Evidence that network diversity influences
the type of speech people tolerate suggests an evolving norm of multicultural
political tolerance that reflects the legal balancing act performed between
individual rights to speech and the need to ensure social inclusion and
prevent discrimination.

Political Tolerance and Contact

The ability to deal with diversity has long played an important role in the
discourse around political tolerance. Being exposed to a diverse group of
peers and ideas arguably leads people to reconsider their position or values
and try to reconcile others’ point of view (Coser, 1975; Mutz, 2002; Reich
726 Social Science Quarterly
and Purbhoo, 1975; Huckfeldt, Mendez, and Osborn, 2004). Exposure to
diversity is typically argued to foster the development of more general cog-
nitive skills necessary for applying abstract democratic principles to concrete
situations (Nie, Junn, and Stehlik-Barry, 1996; Vogt, 1997). Part of the
reason for this is that ‘‘diversity provides an incentive to lessen complete
reliance on established beliefs and predispositions’’ (Marcus et al., 1995:7),
which in turn might help individuals look past their initial dislike of a
group.
Many previous studies mention exposure to diversity to explain relation-
ships between demographic characteristics, political participation, and po-
litical tolerance, but there is almost no research that directly tests the
exposure-tolerance link. There are two notable exceptions. One is the lim-
ited literature that addresses the urban/rural cleavage on political tolerance.
People living in urban areas consistently report higher levels of political
tolerance than those living in rural areas (Stouffer, 1963; Nunn, Crockett,
and Williams, 1978; Wilson, 1985, 1991; Moore and Ovadia, 2006). The
urban diversity hypothesis essentially argues that urban areas expose people
to greater social diversity (Wilson, 1985, 1991). The logic, as expressed in
Stouffer’s (1963:122) original study of political tolerance in the United
States, is that urban dwellers are forced to ‘‘rub shoulders’’ with a variety of
people (see also Wirth, 1938).
Perhaps the main shortcoming of this research is that there is no direct
measure of actual exposure. Relying on community-level Census data in the
United States, actual contact between groups is simply an assumption, and
an unlikely one given what is known about residential segregation in urban
centers in the United States (Iceland, Weinberg, and Steinmetz, 2002).
Furthermore, the mechanisms by which such contact is argued to increase
tolerance are underspecified. Although Stouffer originally argued that ex-
posure increases one’s ability to deal with dissenting ideas, there is a sub-
stantial gap in theorizing about this relationship when it comes to exposure
between groups defined by salient social characteristics.
Work by Mutz (2002, 2006) provides the only direct test of how network
diversity (in her case, diversity of political opinions) can affect political
tolerance judgments. As she notes, ‘‘[t]he capacity to see that there is more
than one side to an issue, that a political conflict is, in fact, a legitimate
controversy with rationales on both sides, translates to greater willingness to
extend civil liberties to even those groups whose political views one dislikes a
great deal’’ (Mutz, 2006:85). In essence, exposure to political diversity is
argued to increase cognitive skills, like perspective taking, needed to deal
with diversity, which in turn leads to a greater willingness to extend civil
liberties to objectionable groups.
There are two reasons why this line of thinking might apply to other types
of diversity, such as racial and ethnic diversity. First, one might argue that
many political disagreements are based, at least partially, in salient social
groups that structure how individuals interpret and experience the society in
Political Tolerance, Racist Speech, and Social Networks 727
which they live (Young, 1990:42–48). Voting behavior research has long
documented how religious identification, class, racial identity, and other
salient social categories influence people’s political opinions (Berelson,
Lazarsfeld, and McPhee, 1954). One might expect, therefore, that being
exposed to a variety of people may expose an individual to a variety of
political perspectives. A second, related possibility is that exposure to social
diversity may increase the cognitive skills that are argued to increase political
tolerance, such as perspective taking and the ability to deal with conflict.
This line of reasoning would hold even if greater social diversity is not
directly related to greater political diversity among one’s associates.
The cognitive empowerment view suggests that greater diversity should
promote a willingness to extend civil liberties to a variety of groups; however,
an equally plausible alternative hypothesis can be found in social psycho-
logical research on intergroup contact. This research generally finds that
contact decreases prejudice among social groups primarily through a process
of identification with out-group members (Allport, 1958; Tafjel and Turner,
1986; Pettigrew, 1998a).1 Contact with the targets of tolerance judgments
has been shown to increase political tolerance (Golebiowska, 1996). Yet,
racially and ethnically diverse social networks may potentially decrease po-
litical tolerance of racist speech by promoting more positive attitudes toward
the groups at which such speech is directed. This extension of the contact
hypothesis may only apply to racist speech that directly challenges racial
equality. While social intolerance is often associated with political intolerance
in general (Stenner, 2005), exposure to racial and ethnic diversity should also
lead to a type of political tolerance that views racist speech as out of bounds;
that is, outside the realm of legitimate political debate and discourse.
There is evidence to suggest that people are capable of similar reasoning.
Experimental research on political tolerance demonstrates that an appeal to
ideas of social equality can make politically tolerant responses more difficult
(Dow and Lendler, 2002; Gibson, 1998; Gross and Kinder, 1998; Cowan et
al., 2002; Sniderman et al., 1996; Druckman, 2001). For example, several
studies have shown that when respondents are primed about equality issues
before being asked to make a tolerance judgment for racist groups, they are
more likely to deny such groups’ civil liberties (Druckman, 2001; Cowan et
al., 2002). Although this relationship works in the opposite direction as well,
there is some evidence that politically tolerant responses are more malleable
when other issues are raised than vice-versa (Peffley, Knigge, and Hurwitz,
2001; Gibson, 1998). When concern about racial equality is evoked, people
appear to be more willing to restrict the civil liberties of groups they deem
socially intolerant.
1
There is also a large body of research that argues that increases in contextual diversity tend
to promote intolerance (Blumer, 1958; Giles and Buckner, 1993; Tolbert and Grummel,
2003). The ‘‘threat hypothesis’’ suggests that as areas become increasingly diverse, out-group
hostility increases. This line of research applies mostly to contextual diversity, where actual
interaction is not assumed.
728 Social Science Quarterly
A Model of Social Network Effects

There are two possibilities, then, for how exposure to racial and ethnic
diversity may affect political tolerance judgments. On the one hand, political
tolerance research suggests that exposure is likely to increase the cognitive
skills that make tolerance more likely. On the other hand, social psycho-
logical research suggests that racial and ethnic diversity may make tolerance
of racist speech less likely.
These two processes are not necessarily mutually exclusive when distinc-
tions across target groups are incorporated into our understanding of po-
litical tolerance. Exposure to racial and ethnic diversity may have different
effects on political tolerance judgments, depending on the type of target
group (Harell, 2010). Similar to political diversity, racial and ethnic diver-
sity should be positively related to an individual’s cognitive capacity to deal
with politically diverse speech. In general, this should lead to more political
tolerance. However, racial and ethnic diversity should also make racist
speech more threatening and increase identification with the intended vic-
tims of such speech. This, in turn, should decrease tolerance of such speech.
The expected outcome is that those with more racially and ethnically diverse
networks are most likely to be ‘‘multicultural tolerators’’—people who are
willing to allow objectionable speech, yet favor limits on speech that threat-
ens the social inclusion of minorities in society. Those not exposed to racial
and ethnic diversity should be less likely to make distinctions across speech,
and other variables should push them either toward intolerance or tolerance.
Diverse social networks, then, may provide citizens with the cognitive
skills needed to tolerate ideas they find objectionable (see, e.g., Stouffer,
1963; Duch and Gibson, 1992; Mutz, 2002), the cognitive impact of racial
and ethnic diversity may extend only to groups that are seen as legitimate
actors in democratic debate; such exposure may make racist speech seen as
particularly illegitimate. The result of this process is the development of
target group distinctions in the willingness to extend civil liberties judg-
ments, which is argued to represent a more multicultural form of tolerance.
This logic can be stated more formally as follows.
H1: Individuals exposed to more racial and ethnic diversity should be less
tolerant of racist speech.
H2: Exposure to racial and ethnic diversity should increase tolerance of other
types of objectionable speech.

Social networks are hypothesized to be key in explaining target group

distinctions.2 Social networks capture the relational ties between individuals.
2
There is, however, a tension between focusing on social networks and diversity. People
tend to associate with others who are similar with respect to demographic variables like race
and gender as well as attitudinal and behavioral attributes (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and
Cook, 2001; Kandel, 1978; Joyner, 2000). This tendency for ‘‘like to attract like’’ is known
Political Tolerance, Racist Speech, and Social Networks 729
Such ties allow for the distribution of information, norms, and ideas among
people (Granovetter, 1973, 1983; Coleman, 1988; Burt, 1997; Lin, Cook,
and Burt, 2001). The focus on social networks is important because social
psychological research suggests that certain conditions must be met: namely,
contact must be among individuals of relatively equal status where shared
goals and activities are cooperative in nature (Allport, 1958). In such set-
tings, consistent evidence suggests that intergroup animosity can be reduced,
and that larger, supra-ordinate identities can be formed among members of
formerly dissimilar groups (Gaertner and Dovidio, 2000; Dovidio et al.,
2001).
The logic developed in this article is that social networks influence at-
titudes, consistent with the largely experimental work on the contact hy-
pothesis (see, e.g., Abrams, Hogg, and Marques, 2005; Brown and
Hewstone, 2006; Pettigrew, 1998b; Dovidio, Gaertner, and Kawakami,
2003). However, outside the laboratory, the direction of causation is less
clear. The people that one chooses to associate with are likely a result of one’s
attitudes toward social diversity as much as they are a cause of them (Stolle
and Hooghe, 2004). Exposure and attitudes likely exist within a reciprocal
relationship, especially if we think about an individual’s networks over the
lifecourse rather than at a given moment in time (Kandel, 1978). Although
youth experiences with diversity may have a lasting impact on their attitudes
about social diversity and political tolerance, there is certainly a risk that
young people’s willingness to make friends with people from different
backgrounds is partly shaped by preexisting attitudes about racial and ethnic
diversity. While the cross-sectional research design employed here cannot
address the issue of causality directly, controlling for preexisting attitudes
toward social diversity is certainly a necessary first step to assess whether
social networks appear to have an independent effect on political tolerance
attitudes.

Data and Methods

The data used for this analysis are drawn from the Canadian Youth Survey
(CANYS) conducted among 10th- and 11th-grade students in Quebec and
Ontario, Canada during the 2005–2006 school year (Stolle et al., 2006).
Students were sampled in schools from seven cities selected to vary in terms
of size. The two largest cities were selected in each province (Toronto and
Montreal), along with two medium-sized cities of approximately 150,000
inhabitants, and three small towns with approximately 15,000 inhabitants.3

as homophily and is a significant barrier to cross-group ties. Yet, evidence will be provided
that such cross-group ties are present among the youth sampled in this study.
3
The names of the medium and small-sized cities may not be disclosed to ensure the
anonymity of the schools in the study.
730 Social Science Quarterly
Schools in each city were selected to vary in terms of the socioeconomic
status of students and the homogeneity of the student population. In the
medium and small towns, all school boards were contacted and an effort was
made to survey as many schools as possible. Two classes, on average, were
surveyed, with an average response rate of 94 percent in each class. Within
each city in the sample, the socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds of the
students are similar to the city in which they were sampled, and the dis-
tribution of schools approximates the language and public/private distribu-
tion of schools in each city.4 The sample, while not representative, is
suggestive of the context within these seven cities.
In total, 3,334 respondents completed the self-administered question-
naire. The average age of respondents was 16 years old. The gender break-
down was 58 percent female and 42 percent male. The gender imbalance
reflects the inclusion of several private girls schools in the sample. Boys-only
schools are less common in general, and this is true in the school sample as
well. The racial composition of the sample was 62 percent white and 38
percent nonwhite.5 It should be noted that for nonwhite respondents, con-
tact with those from different ethnic and racial backgrounds can include
both majority and other minority group members. Furthermore, nonwhite
respondents may already self-identify as the targets of racist speech. There is
little reason, therefore, to believe that the logic in this article should apply in
a similar manner for minority youth. For this reason, the analysis is limited
to white youth (N 5 2,071).
A sample in Canada is ideal for testing how attitudes toward racist speech
compare to other types of objectionable speech. Canada has both civil and
criminal laws that prohibit hate speech, and court challenges to this leg-
islation have consistently failed (Sumner, 2004). The focus on youth is also
intentional, as one might expect younger generations to be more likely to
see racist speech as harmful given the increasingly diverse nature of Western
societies. This is consistent with recent work that has found heightened
intolerance of racist speech among the most recent generation of university
graduates in the United States (Chong, 2006).
The dependent variable is constructed from a political tolerance battery.6
Modified from commonly used tolerance batteries to make it amenable to a
self-administered survey, the goal was to include a number of potentially
objectionable groups that differ in the exclusionary nature of their speech.
The final battery includes five different potentially objectionable groups:
racists, skinheads, radical Muslims, gay rights activists, and Quebec sepa-

4
For detailed information about the sample characteristics, see the CANYS technical
report.
5
The high percentage of nonwhite respondents reflects the oversampling of urban areas in
this study. Consistent with immigration patterns in Canada, the largest group of nonwhite
respondents is of Asian descent.
6
Of the 2,071 white respondents, 90 percent provided valid responses for the entire
battery.
Political Tolerance, Racist Speech, and Social Networks 731
ratists. Racists and skinheads were included to represent racist groups that
promote exclusionary ideas. For each group, the respondent is asked to
indicate whether it should be allowed to (1) hold a peaceful march in the
respondent’s neighborhood and (2) talk on television about the members’
views. The answer categories are dichotomous (yes or no). The respondent
was also asked to indicate his or her level of agreement or disagreement with
each group on an 11-point Likert scale. The inclusion of this last item allows
replication of a modified version of the ‘‘least-liked’’ methodology created
by Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus (1979) while still ensuring comparisons
across different types of target groups.
Based on the reported tolerance of different types of groups, respondents
are coded as falling into three categories:7
1. Intolerant: These individuals do not support speech rights for any
group they found objectionable.
2. Multicultural Tolerators: Individuals who support speech rights for at
least one group they found objectionable, but did not extend speech
rights to an exclusionary groups.
3. Absolute Tolerators: Individuals who extended speech rights, irrespec-
tive of the target group.

The coding is based on whether each respondent was willing to allow at

least one objectionable group and one exclusionary group to both have civil
liberties, controlling for prior disagreement.8 Among white respondents who
found at least one of each type of group objectionable, 27 percent were
intolerant, 12 percent fell into the absolute tolerance category, and fully 61
percent of young people made a distinction between exclusionary groups
and other groups, only permitting the latter to express themselves publicly.
The main independent variables are questions about the composition of
the respondents’ networks. Each respondent was asked how many of their
close friends (strong ties) and how many of the other people at school they
speak with other than their close friends (weak ties) were from a different
race or ethnicity than them.9 Answers varied on a seven-point scale from
7
A fourth category is, of course, possible: those who only support exclusionary groups but
not the other groups. While theoretically possible, this response pattern is extremely unlikely
(about 2 percent of all respondents) and reflects the fact that exclusionary speech does seem to
be particularly reprehensible to young citizens in a multicultural country like Canada. These
respondents have been dropped from the analysis.
8
Two dummy variables were created: one dummy for if they allowed racists and/or skin-
heads to participate in both civil liberties activities (those who did not disagree with at least
one of these groups were dropped) and one dummy if they allowed at least one of the other
groups they found objectionable to participate in both civil liberties. The combination of
responses to these dummy variables was used to create the three categories of the dependent
variable. Because political tolerance requires prior disagreement (Sullivan, Piereson, and
Marcus, 1979), respondents who did not disagree with at least one of each type of group were
excluded from the analysis (N 5 363).
9
In the English version, the questions referred only to a ‘‘different race’’ rather than ‘‘race
and ethnicity.’’
732 Social Science Quarterly
0 5 none to 6 5 all, where higher scores always indicate more diversity. Due
to the high intercorrelation between answers to these two questions
(r 5 0.66), the scales were combined into a single additive scale that ranges
from 0 to 6.10 The resulting scale is skewed toward 0, with a mean of 2.0.
In an attempt to partly control for attitudinal dispositions toward racial
minorities, a scale measuring closeness to minorities was developed based on
responses to three questions. Respondents were asked to rate how close they
felt to three groups: Muslims, immigrants, and blacks. These groups rep-
resent three salient categories of minorities in Canada. Answers run from 0
to 10, where 10 meant feeling close to the interests, feelings, and ideas of the
group, and 0 meant feeling distant from that group. The responses were
compiled into a single additive scale, ranging from 0 to 1 (alpha 5 0.835).
The inclusion of this variable is essential in order to minimize the potential
that a social network effect is spurious, resulting from the relationship be-
tween racial tolerance and political tolerance that has been noted in previous
research (Stenner, 2005). While controlling for closeness to minorities does
not solve the issue of causality between racial tolerance and social network
diversity, it does strengthen the argument that social networks may have an
independent effect on political tolerance judgments above and beyond any
relationship between racial and political tolerance.
In addition, contextual factors that may affect the opportunity to interact
with people from different backgrounds are included as controls as well.
Contextual diversity may confound the impact of actual interaction on
political attitudes by limiting the opportunity for some youth to make cross-
group friendships (in homogenous areas) and by counteracting identification
in areas characterized by diversity that do not result in positive interaction.
In other words, diverse areas may confound the effects of network diversity
on political attitudes. To control for this, the natural log of the mean level of
visible minorities per school is included as a control. The measure of racial
diversity is calculated based on the number of racial minorities sampled in
each school.11
Because network diversity and tolerance judgments are also influenced by
a host of demographic and political variables, a number of additional control
variables are also included in the models, including level of political activism
(0 to 5 or more), political knowledge (scale from 0 to 1 based on three
questions), organization involvement (0 to 4 or more organizations), gender
(1 5 female), urban/rural (1 5 urban), parental education level (1 5 one or
both parents university educated), religious affiliation (nonreligious is ref-

10
In instances when respondents provided valid responses to only one of the two network
questions, that value was used in the scale. Four percent of the final scale is based on only one
of the two questions.
11
An official breakdown of the entire student population at each institution would be
preferable, but record keeping of this type of information varied substantially across schools
and prevented a reliable school-reported measure.
Political Tolerance, Racist Speech, and Social Networks 733
erence category), and religious attendance (0 5 never to 4 5 more than once
a week).

Network Diversity and Multicultural Tolerance

Table 1 reports the mean network diversity score by type of political

tolerance. The expectation is that those with more racial and ethnic diversity
in their networks will be more likely to fall into the multicultural tolerance
category. In the first column, results are reported for all white respondents.
Consistent with expectations, those categorized as multicultural tolerators
have the highest mean network diversity. However, these differences are not
significant when the standard errors are adjusted for the clustered nature of
the data.
Clearly, having friends from different racial and ethnic backgrounds is
partially dependent on one’s opportunities to meet such people. Given the
contingent nature of network diversity on one’s context, it is useful to
examine the relationship between network diversity and tolerance attitudes
in contexts where such diversity is possible. In the second column of
Table 1, mean network diversity is presented only for respondents from
schools where at least 10 percent of the sample was nonwhite. The pattern is
consistent with expectations. Those in the multicultural tolerance category
report, on average, that more of their friends and school acquaintances are
from a different racial or ethnic background compared to those in the
intolerant category (po0.10). The difference between multicultural and
absolute tolerance, however, is not significant.

TABLE 1
Mean Network Diversity by Type of Tolerance Among White Youth

Network Diversity Scale (0–6)

White Respondents in
Schools with 10%1Visible
White Respondents Minority

Mean (s.e.) N Mean (s.e.) N

Intolerant 1.89 (0.12) 422 2.14 (0.13) 317
Multicultural tolerator 2.07 (0.14) 934 2.49 (0.12) 656
Absolute tolerator 2.00 (0.12) 185 2.20 (0.13) 149
Total 2.01 (0.11) 1,541 2.40 (0.11) 1,122

NOTE: Table provides mean network diversity score by type of tolerance. Robust standard errors
are reported, adjusted for the clustered nature of the data. See text for detailed coding of
variables.
SOURCE: Canadian Youth Study.
734 Social Science Quarterly
TABLE 2
Network Diversity, Identification, and Tolerance Types Among White Youth

Intolerant Absolute Tolerance

Coef. (Robust s.e.) Coef. (Robust s.e.)

Racial/ethnic diversityw  0.177 (0.09) n n  0.193 (0.08) n n
Closeness to minorities  0.654 (0.36) n 0.675 (0.39) n
Log of % minority in school 0.262 (0.12) n n 0.157 (0.11)
Political knowledge scale  1.143 (0.22) n n n  0.245 (0.29)
Political activism scale  0.226 (0.04) n n n  0.099 (0.06)
Number of organizations 0.025 (0.07) 0.140 (0.09) n
Female  0.738 (0.15) n n n 0.200 (0.22)
Parent(s) university educated  0.299 (0.18) n  0.022 (0.19)
Catholic 0.322 (0.22)  0.614 (0.20) n n n
Other Christian 0.740 (0.26) n n n  0.328 (0.26)
Jewish  0.154 (0.45)  0.822 (0.42) n
Religious attendance 0.273 (0.07) n n n 0.110 (0.13)
Constant 1.478 (0.40) n n n  0.757 (0.43) n
N 1,328
McFadden’s Pseudo R2 0.081
Nagelkerke Pseudo R2 0.164
w
Racial and ethnic diversity is a composite scale for both friends and acquaintances at school.
nnn
po0.01; n npo0.05; npo0.10.
NOTE: Results are multinomial logistic regressions for types of tolerance, where multicultural
tolerance is the reference category. Standard errors have been adjusted to account for school
clusters. Analysis is limited to white respondents.
SOURCE: Canadian Youth Study.

Given the potential for school context to affect both network diversity and
political tolerance, as well as a host of other variables, Table 2 presents
multinomial logistic regressions to test whether racial and ethnic diversity in
one’s networks help distinguish between types of tolerance, after controlling
for other important predictors. The raw coefficients are presented, with
robust standard errors adjusted for the clustered nature of the data.
As predicted, the racial and ethnic diversity in one’s networks has a sig-
nificant negative effect on both intolerance (po0.05) and absolute tolerance
(po0.05), and the size of the coefficients are similar.12 This means that
racial and ethnic diversity in one’s networks increases the probability of
being in the multicultural tolerance category, compared to both intolerance
and absolute tolerance. It should be noted that these effects are robust with
the inclusion of controls for attitudes toward minorities and the contextual

12
Because there was a difference in the wording of the network diversity variables in the
French and English version of the survey in Canada, the model was run separately with a
variable for language of survey (not shown). No substantial differences in the variables of
interest are observed.
Political Tolerance, Racist Speech, and Social Networks 735
FIGURE 1
Predicted Probabilities of Tolerance by Racial/Ethnic Diversity Among Whites
0.9

0.8

0.7
Predicted Probabilities

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0 .1

0
None 1 2 3 4 5 All
Racial/Ethnic Diversity in Networks

NOTE: CLARIFY is used to obtain predictions and 95% confidence intervals.

See text for details of estimation.
SOURCE: Canadian Youth Study.

diversity of the school setting.13 In other words, testing directly for exposure
to racial and ethnic diversity in one’s social networks suggests that such
diversity can affect the types of tolerance judgments that young people
make. While greater diversity pushes people away from intolerance, con-
sistent with the political tolerance literature’s diversity hypothesis, this does
not appear to extend to exclusionary groups that directly challenge the
socially tolerant behaviors of these young people.
To highlight these effects, Figure 1 presents the predicted probabilities that
a white youth in Canada will be in a given tolerance category as racial and
ethnic diversity increases. CLARIFY is used to obtain the predicted prob-
abilities and 95 percent confidence intervals (King, Tomz, and Wittenberg,
2000). For each one unit increase in racial and ethnic diversity, predicted
probabilities are estimated where all interval level values are set at the sample
mean, except gender, which is set to male, and the religious denomination
variables, which are set to 0, making the nonreligious the default category.

13
When the model in Table 2 is run separately for those in schools with at least 10 percent
nonwhite respondents, the network effects remain negative and significant (results not
shown).
736 Social Science Quarterly
The pattern conforms to theoretical expectations. As network diversity
increases from lowest to highest, the probability that a respondent is a
multicultural tolerator increases from 50 percent to 75 percent for nonre-
ligious men when all other variables are held at their means.14 The prob-
ability of intolerance or absolute tolerance decreases. While the difference
between the predicted probabilities is not significant when network diversity
equals 0, at every other point in the estimate the difference between mul-
ticultural tolerance and the two other categories are significant. This is
precisely the pattern that was expected: exposure to racial diversity is sig-
nificantly linked to the likelihood that an individual will express a more
multicultural form of tolerance. It also appears, as expected, to be related to
a decreased probability of both intolerance and absolute tolerance.
In sum, there is substantial support for the finding that young whites with
more diverse networks are more likely to express a multicultural form of
tolerance in Canada. Those surrounded by racially and ethnically diverse
friends are more likely to allow a group they find objectionable to hold a
peaceful march in their neighborhood and to talk on public television about
their views. However, tolerating racist groups, as absolute tolerators do by
definition, becomes increasingly unlikely. If tolerance of all speech, even
racist speech, is the democratic ideal, as it appears in much of the literature,
then increasing racial and ethnic diversity would seem to have uninvited
consequences for democratic politics. Yet the evidence presented here pro-
vides reason for optimism in the sense that diversity does increase tolerance
of some types of speech, while at the same time making support for the
rights of exclusionary groups less likely. These findings suggest that the link
between exposure to racial and ethnic diversity and attitudes about civil
liberties is a development of distinctions across types of speech. Young
Canadians who are able to make friends with people from different racial
and ethnic backgrounds appear to be more tolerant, both socially and po-
litically. Yet, they are also more likely to differentiate the types of speech
they see as legitimate in democratic debate.

Conclusion

This study examined the extent to which exposure to racial and ethnic
diversity influences tolerance judgments among youth in Canada. Despite a
long tradition of emphasizing the benefit of exposure to diversity, little
empirical research has examined the ways such exposure affects tolerance
judgments. This article tested the argument that exposure to racial and
ethnic diversity would have divergent effects on tolerance judgments de-
14
Changing the simulation criteria does not change the direction of effects in Figure 1,
although it does shift the levels. Given that the average response on the racial and ethnic ties
scale was about 2, the estimations approximate the distribution in the full sample.
Political Tolerance, Racist Speech, and Social Networks 737
pending on the nature of speech that a young person was being asked to
tolerate. Consistent with expectations, Canadian youth with more diverse
networks were most likely to fall in the multicultural tolerance category that
distinguishes between most speech and racist speech.
The contributions to the literature from this article are at least threefold.
First, while the relationship between exposure and social tolerance is well
documented, the relationship between exposure and civil liberties judgments
has received little attention in previous research. Although Gibson (2004,
2006) and Stenner (2005) have begun to look more systematically at the
relationship between social tolerance and political tolerance, the research
presented here provides a more robust examination of the contact hypothesis
by including actual exposure to racial and ethnic diversity. Furthermore, the
focus on how exposure may have different effects depending on the nature of
the objectionable speech is an addition to a literature that largely constructs
political tolerance as a unidimensional concept. Finally, the focus on racial
and ethnic diversity is intentional in order to address the source of many of
the identity-based conflicts that emerge in multicultural democracies. In
general, then, this article suggests strongly that there are benefits of exam-
ining the ways actual exposure to social diversity can and does influence the
ways people respond to questions of rights in multicultural democracies.
Exposure to diversity obviously does not take place in a vacuum—it is
likely to be strongly affected by the larger context in which such interaction
occurs, including the overall levels of diversity in a country and the norm
environment in which such diversity is experienced. Future research must
explore whether the legal environment in Canada and its history of mul-
ticulturalism is uniquely likely to foster the types of relationships observed
here. Is Canada representative of other advanced democracies in this respect,
or is it an outlier? While the evidence presented here can only speak directly
to the Canadian context, it does show the potential for racial and ethnic
diversity to influence a key democratic value. Contemporary democracies are
becoming more diverse and with this change have also come intense conflicts
between individual rights and social inclusion. This study provides an in-
sight into how the next generation may be inclined to resolve this conflict. In
doing so, it points to the potentially powerful effect of social networks in
shaping democratic values.

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