Vol. 13 No. 11 (November 2003)

OVERCOMING INTOLERANCE IN SOUTH AFRICA, by James L. Gibson and Amanda Gouws. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 280 pp. Cloth $55.00. ISBN: 0-521-81390-5.

Reviewed by Christopher Zorn, Law and Social Science Program, National Science Foundation. E-mail: czorn@nsf.gov. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and do not reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the United States Government.

In OVERCOMING INTOLERANCE IN SOUTH AFRICA, Jim Gibson and Amanda Gouws have written what is, in at least one respect, a courageous book. It is courageous because it is in many ways pessimistic about the prospects for political tolerance (and therefore, they argue, for democratic consolidation) in post-apartheid South Africa. While not a particularly surprising view – contemporary South Africa, riven by racial tension, political strife, economic instability, and an epidemic of HIV/AIDS, is by nearly all objective criteria a most unlikely candidate for a successful transition to stable democratic rule – it is nonetheless a position at odds with nearly all policy makers and commentators, who generally offer much rosier predictions for South Africa's political future.

Thus, when Gibson and Gouws begin with a somewhat bleak forecast about the possibility of tolerance there, I expected it to be a set-up for a dramatic concluding turnabout. What I found instead was a creative, meticulous, and thoroughly honest depiction of the condition of mass political tolerance in South Africa, albeit one which paints a somewhat more dismal picture of the future than others might have it. Their theoretical approach is psychological, drawing most heavily on the work of Paul Sniderman, John Sullivan, and George Marcus, as well as on Gibson's own prior work in the U.S., South Africa, and Russia. In this view, democratic political tolerance – in essence, a willingness to allow one's political opponents to act within the confines of a democratic system – is closely linked to the notion of threat, both real and perceived, which in turn is often a function of social (i.e., group) identity. Gibson and Gouws evaluate these theories' expectations with data from a two-wave panel survey of South Africans, conducted during 1996 and 1997. The details of this survey are painstakingly outlined in an Appendix, and the survey itself could be the subject of its own review. Suffice it to say that, in addition to the care with which the sample was chosen, the instrument benefits from the incorporation of a number of experimental and quasi-experimental components with which to disentangle the myriad influences that shape tolerance in South Africa.

A brief overview of South Africa's recent political history in Chapter 2 sets the stage for the book's theoretical and empirical core. Part II, encompassing Chapters 3 through 5, might best be summarized by a line found much later in the text: "[T]olerant South Africans are a lonely few" (p.173). Through analysis of a series of questions and vignettes, Gibson and Gouws reveal that not only is intolerance commonplace, but also that it is "pluralistic," occurring across the whole range of racial groups in South African society, and that it is relatively unresponsive to the nature of the particular situation in question. So, for example, such factors as the endorsement of a demonstration by community leaders failed to have any effect on individuals' willingness to tolerate that demonstration. But while their conclusions are at times depressing for those who desire to see a stable, democratic South Africa, the authors themselves nonetheless maintain a tempered optimism about that country's future.

That they manage to do so is largely a function of Part III, which focuses on the prospects for attitude change and which is, for my money, the most compelling part of the book. Once again, though, Gibson and Gouws paint a picture of tolerance which is, at best, mixed. While intolerant attitudes are somewhat malleable, tolerant ones are even more so; consistent with work in other countries, it is far easier to convince South Africans to be intolerant than to tolerate. Similarly, Chapter 8's exploitation of the panel structure of the survey finds that, while tolerance remained relatively stable in the aggregate over their two surveys, at the individual level substantial racial differences exist in the direction and causes of changes in toleration. Thus, in many respects, positive shifts in tolerance among colored South Africans (who benefited from apartheid) mirror the negative shifts among whites. Similarly, the absence of well-developed democratic norms among black South Africans – undoubtedly the result of years of powerlessness and disenfranchisement – contrasts with the strength of democratic commitments among South Africans of Asian descent, many of whom trace their roots to democratic India.

Many of the readers of this review will be most interested in Chapter 7, which details the authors' experiments with the interplay of political tolerance and judicial institutions, most notably South Africa's Constitutional Court. Here again, the verdict is, on balance, grim: while South Africans can, under some circumstances, be convinced to tolerate their political foes by a decision of the Court, those in the black majority are the least likely to do so. Conversely, however, the ability of the Court to engender intolerance is immense by comparison, leading to real concerns over the Court's potential to act as a counter-majoritarian force.

Of course, there are things about the book with which one can quibble. For example, throughout the book, the reader is barraged with tables of analyses, a necessary inclusion in this heavily empirical work but also a decidedly mixed blessing from a stylistic perspective. At the same time, the book contains remarkably few figures; a judicious use of graphical presentations might have ameliorated a bit of the inundation one feels in some of the later chapters. But while the tables can at times be bewildering, the book's saving grace is the text which accompanies them. In the hands of less gifted writers, much of the analyses therein would have been transformed from a careful exploration of a fascinating and important question into a powerful sleep aid. While in its current form OVERCOMING INTOLERANCE may not satisfy some readers' desire for tales from places far away, its solid theoretical grounding, creative use of experimental designs in a survey context, and forthright (if a bit gloomy) conclusions are a model for research on such a simultaneously slippery and significant subject. And despite the authors generally acherontic outlook, the authors remain guardedly upbeat about the prospects for a tolerant, multiracial, democratic South Africa. One can but hope that their optimism is both warranted and realized.

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Copyright 2003 by the author, Christopher Zorn.