Left-Right Social Identity and the Polarization of Political Tolerance

Prof. Mark Peffley, Dr. Omer Yair, and Prof. Mark Hutchison

An avalanche of studies, mostly in the U.S., finds that people who strongly identify with ideological (and partisan) groups are far more likely to express hostility, prejudice and even a willingness to commit violence toward opposition groups. And political animosity in the U.S. is symmetrical; it is every bit as powerful among Democrats and liberals as it is among Republicans and conservatives. As social identity theory predicts, strong identification with a political ingroup creates a tendency to see the political world in terms of “left” versus “right” or “us” versus “them.” 

There are two large gaps in the literature that we addressed in our recent article, published in Political Research Quarterly. First, there were no studies of whether strong political identities also contribute to political intolerance—i.e., an unwillingness to extend basic civil liberties, such as free speech or the right to demonstrate, to groups one opposes. And second, can we generalize the symmetry in political intolerance across leftists and rightists in the U.S. to other countries, like Israel?  

Our 2018 survey study in Israel was the first to investigate the connection between left-right identities and political intolerance—in this case, among Israeli Jews. In contrast to research in the U.S., we hypothesized and found stronger left-right identities polarize levels of political intolerance across the Right and Left. Among right-wingers, stronger attachments increase political intolerance toward disliked groups, while among left-wingers, stronger attachments decrease intolerance. Thus, even in a highly polarized country like Israel, where perceived threats from opposition groups remain high, among Jewish leftists, identity strength can be a protector of democratic values, leading leftists to be more, not less tolerant toward groups they oppose. 

To be clear, left-right identities in our study are, first and foremost, social identities reflecting the intensity of people’s psychological attachments to being a leftist or rightist. To measure left-right identities, we followed studies in the U.S.  and Israel, asking Jewish respondents how important being a leftist (rightist) was to them, in addition to their social and emotional attachments to being a leftist (rightist). Based on three empirical tests described below, we found more intense left-right identities consistently polarize levels of political intolerance across Israeli Jews on the Right and Left, even after statistically controlling for a long list of respondent characteristics (e.g., their religiosity, support for civil liberties, perceived threat from the group, and demographic variables). 

Our first set of results provides compelling evidence for the polarization hypothesis. We used the least-liked method of asking people to pick the domestic group they dislike the most from a list of 14 groups, followed by political tolerance questions tailored to their least-liked group (e.g., “should [group] be allowed to demonstrate?”). Indeed, we found that more strongly identified leftists were far more tolerant toward their least-liked group than weakly identified leftists, while rightists were increasingly intolerant.  

In a second test, we also asked respondents about their political tolerance of Arab citizens of Israel. To be sure, we fully expected rightists to be more intolerant of Arab citizens than leftists. But what separated intense rightists from leftists is their far higher level of political intolerance toward Israeli Arabs, who constitute one fifth of the Israeli citizenry. Not only were intense right-wingers less willing than leftists to allow Israeli Arabs to demonstrate or speak on TV, they were also more likely to believe that Arab citizens simply do not deserve the same basic human rights as Jewish citizens. 

Our third test of the polarization hypothesis is based on an experiment embedded in the second wave of the survey that raised the level of threat from a hypothetical terrorist attack to see whether strongly identified leftists would become as politically intolerant of Arab citizens as their rightist counterparts. Here we capitalized on the fact that most terrorist attacks in Israel are perpetrated by Palestinian groups in the occupied territories and that Jews on the Right associate threats from Palestinians with Arab citizens. Thus, in the Terrorist Threat Experiment, respondents were randomly assigned to one of three different introductory scenarios manipulating terrorist threat and the identity of the terrorists before asking all respondents two questions about their tolerance toward Arab citizens: “To prevent terrorist attacks in the future, to what extent do you support or oppose the government…,” 1) “prohibiting Arab citizens of Israel from demonstrating?” and 2) “arresting Arab citizens of Israel and holding them in administrative detention without trial?”  

The findings are revealing. In the Baseline condition, when respondents were simply asked the two questions above without mentioning a terrorist attack, the strength of left-right identities had no discernible effect on intolerance toward Arab citizens for either leftists or rightists. In the two treatment conditions, however, when a hypothetical terrorist attack is mentioned (“Suppose a series of terrorist attacks [take place] in Israel, in which dozens of people are killed and many others are wounded”), we find a powerful polarization effect. As expected, more intense rightists become increasingly intolerant toward Arab citizens. By contrast, more intense leftists are increasingly opposed to repressing Arab citizens, doubtless because they oppose repeated efforts by right-wing forces to repress Arab citizens. The responses of weakly identified leftists, on the other hand, resemble those of strongly identified rightists. When confronted with a hypothetical terrorist attack in the treatment conditions, their political tolerance of Arab citizens plummets significantly, compared to the Baseline condition.   

Our results have important implications for understanding the role of social identities and political intolerance in Israel and other countries. Stronger ingroup identities do not universally lead to increased hostility toward domestic outgroups. In fact, outside the US, identity strength can actually be a protector of democratic values, leading some groups –i.e., strong Jewish leftists—to become more tolerant, even in the face of powerful external threats, the likes of which most US citizens rarely encounter. What makes strong leftists distinct in Israel is their resilient level of forbearance toward both least-liked groups and Arab citizens. 

The behavior of intensely identified rightists in Israel, on the other hand, is in keeping with extreme-right groups in other democracies facing extreme polarization and high levels of security threat. Israeli rightists adopt an ethnonationalist view of the nation that amplifies perceptions of existential threat from their domestic enemies. And they are far more likely to support the kind of democratic backsliding—i.e., the “erosion of institutions, rules and norms pushed by elected autocratic governments”—that Israel confronts today. Our results also suggest that weak leftists (and centrists) could split from the coalition protecting liberal democracy if, for whatever reason, terrorist attacks escalate.  One challenge for the anti-reform coalition is to avoid raising the specter of Palestinian attacks that would likely split the coalition.      

Prof. Mark Peffley is a professor of political science at the University of Kentucky (mpeffl@uky.edu).

Dr. Omer Yair is a research associate at the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at Reichman University (omer.yair@post.runi.ac.il).

Prof. Marc L. Hutchison is a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island (mlhutch@gmail.com).

The post is based on this article:
Peffley, Mark, Omer Yair, and Marc L. Hutchison. 2023. "Left-Right Social Identity and the Polarization of Political Tolerance." Political Research Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231189759