Social Identities and Political Intolerance: Linkages Within the South African Mass Public

Social Identity Theory offers a useful understanding of the psychodynamics of affiliations with groups, while theories of political tolerance explain why some citizens are unwilling to tolerate their political enemies. Despite the obvious logical connection, little extant research has joined these two theories. We hypothesize that strong ingroup positive identities create strong outgroup negative identities, which are in turn connected to antipathy toward one's political opponents, perceptions that those opponents an threatening, and, ultimately, to political intolerance. We test these hypotheses using survey data from the South African mass public. Generally, nominal group membership is not the most significant variable; instead, attitudes toward group solidarity have a pervasive impact on all aspects of political intolerance. We also identify some significant predictors of threat perceptions among the social identity variables. We conclude by arguing that strong group identities pose a difficult challenge for the consolidation of democracy in South Africa.