In this paper, we examine how young people’s early experience with diversity shape the ways in which they make decisions about political and religious freedoms as young adults. Such rights are intimately tied to the ways in which modern democracies respond to the ethnic, religious and racial diversity that
characterize their populations, yet we know relatively little about how the two
are intertwined. Drawing on a unique two-wave longitudinal study of young people in Canada, we focus ion how school diversity and diversity within social networks during high school can influence attitudes toward various civil liberties, in particular support for free speech, hate speech restrictions and religious freedom. We test whether experiences with diversity promotes attitudes that more in line with liberal democratic or liberal multicultural conceptions of democracy.
