Becoming Tolerant? Short-Term Changes in Russian Political Culture

Though ordinary Russians have embraced many aspects of democratic culture, their learning to tolerate their political enemies has been the most difficult democratic lesson for many. In this article, I analyse change in political tolerance in Russia, using panel data I collected in 1996 and 1998 in a nationally representative sample of Russians. Two bodies of theory are considered to generate hypotheses about change: the conventional cross-sectional model of the aetiology of tolerance; and experiential theory, based on perceptions of the performance of both the economic and political systems. The dynamic character of the model is provided by perceptions of the performance of the economy, of the political system and of the seriousness of the crime problem in Russia. Many of my findings are unexpected. For instance, tolerance seems to beget tolerance, in the sense that, over time, those who are tolerant tend to perceive diminishing threats from their political enemies. Yet threat perceptions are sustained by perceptions of the political and economic conditions in contemporary Russia. Perceptions of the change in crime are especially important since they seem to exacerbate perceptions of political threat, thereby eroding both political tolerance and support for democratic institutions and process. Paradoxically, threat is also sustained by democratic values – those who support democratic institutions and processes are more likely to perceive threats from their political enemies, a finding peculiar to the unsettled Russian case. Thus, this analysis goes some distance towards discovering the causes of changes in both Russian tolerance and intolerance.