Old and New Contexts of Political Tolerance in the Digital Age: Where Citizens Set Limits to Violence and Extremism

In a long tradition of research on political tolerance, many studies have emphasised the relevance of contexts and concerned groups for judgements on different rights and liberties. In the course of time, the focus of research has shifted from communists and atheists, etc. to other groups as objects of intolerance. However, contexts have changed in which intolerance and institutional limits to intolerance are debated. For instance, online hate speech is an important challenge to contemporary societies. The proposed paper takes up this issue and compares tolerance judgements concerning internet usage and public meetings of different groups. Making use of a survey experiment, the study goes beyond the scope of previous work in considering not only specific target groups of tolerance (extreme right-wing, extreme left-wing, radical Islamist) in different experimental conditions but also in focusing on the intentions of these groups and their potential for violent behaviour. The aim of the paper is to compare tolerance judgements and to analyse whether the public sets limits to tolerance in case of extremism or violence regardless of different settings and groups. It will be shown that experimentally induced evidence on the potential of violence accommodates individual attitudes towards tolerance through different ideological positions. The empirical analyses in this paper are based on data from a telephone survey of a random sample of adults living in Germany. The survey was conducted 2016 within the scope of a research project on support for civil liberties under different conditions.