Political Tolerance as Essential Aspect of Attitudes to Democracy

Surveys show that both citizens of embedded democracies and subjects of authoritarian regimes share the positive attitude of democracy. However, can we be sure that both have the same concept in mind? The public attitude in this issue is determined not by political theory, but by the context of public politics, peculiarities of political socialization and the history of a country. Public opinion research on democracy inevitably faces the need to compare the attitudes and values of citizens with existing political theories. Thus, in exploring the understanding of democracy, Dalton Shin and Jou (Dalton, Shin, and Jou 2007) divide respondents into three main groups. Except for those who are at a loss for an answer, some respondents define democracy as related rights and liberties, others as a set of institutions and procedures, and others through various socio-economic benefits. These points of view correlate with the liberties-approach, the electoralstic approach, and the social-democratic theory of democracy. For all the value of this data, it misses one of the key aspects of understanding democracy. In the history of political thought, the radical democratic approach, which goes back to the J.-J. Rousseau’s ideas of “souveraineté populaire”, opposes the liberal tradition. Talking about the rule of the people, is a respondent ready to accept the contradiction of interest groups within a nation, or he or she sees the people as a monolithic unity? In General, the studies of political tolerance are aimed at determining the extent to which respondents are willing to grant and guarantee political and civil rights to the least sympathetic, alien and even dangerous categories of fellow citizens. In the liberal model, small and cohesive groups are inevitably more effective in promoting their interests than the amorphous majority. This creates some "resentment of the majority", to which populist politicians appeal, promising them new “illiberal” democracy, based on “traditional” values. It is noteworthy that the spread of tolerance can be considered in the context of modernization theories of democracy. Exploring the meaning of democracy from the attitude of political tolerance opens unexpected prospects. On the material of 13 post-Communist countries, D. Guérin and coauthors (Guérin, Petry, and Crête 2004) found that citizens who had an experience of participating in protests show a higher level of political tolerance. Remarkably, this is also true for those whose activism was aimed against democratic changes in their country. Research on the attitude to democracy should be based on a comparison of nominal and essential meanings. On the one hand, it is important to understand what sense respondents attach to the category of democracy and, accordingly, how they relate to this phenomenon. On the other hand, it is necessary to consider whether a respondent shares the Western polyarchic vision of democracy. This paper claims that the key indicator here can be the level of political tolerance. The inclusion of a tolerance assessment in the study may fill in existing gaps in research on the meaning of democracy.