Political tolerance and stages of moral development: A conceptual and empirical alternative

The latest revisionism in the study of political tolerance has produced some of the most provocative well-designed research in the field of political science. In particular, the work by Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus offers one of the most fully specified and rigorously executed models of public opinion formation. Yet this contemporary revisionism is flawed. This paper argues that these researchers misconceptualize tolerance, that this misconception contaminates their measurement process, that the resulting model is misspecified, and that the political conclusions offered are not supported in fact or principle. More generally this paper argues that the field of public opinion as a whole has been trapped by limited conceptions about the nature of cognitive constraint and by simplistic and inadequate methods for measuring and identifying this constraint. To remedy this, a developmental measure of cognitive moral stages is fashioned along lines suggested by Kohlberg. This measure satisfies a number of tests for both validity and reliability and appears to be one of the most powerful predictors of tolerance and intolerance — if not the most powerful single predictor.