At the Forefront of Political Psychology

Essays in Honor of John L. Sullivan

Eugene Borgida, Christopher M. Federico, Joanne M. Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367368173
• eBook ISBN: 9781000768275
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Psychology

At the Forefront of Political Psychology pays tribute to John L. Sullivan, one of the most influential political psychologists of his generation. Sullivan's scholarly contributions have deeply shaped our knowledge of belief systems and political tolerance, two flourishing research areas in political psychology that are crucial to understanding the turbulence of our times.

This volume, compiled by three of Sullivan's longtime colleagues and collaborators, includes cutting-edge contributions from scholars in political science and psychology. The book is divided into three sections; the first two focus on how Sullivan's work on political tolerance and belief systems influenced generations of political psychologists. The final section offers a more personal look at Sullivan's influence as a mentor to young scholars, many of whom are now intellectual leaders in political psychology. The chapters featured here elucidate how these students were able to flourish under Sullivan's tutelage and lifelong mentorship.

One of John L. Sullivan's defining traits is his generosity—as a scholar, mentor, leader, and friend. Over the years, many have benefited greatly from Sullivan's willingness to share his intellect, insight, and passion for democratic values. This impressive collection will appeal to both students and professors of political psychology, but also scholars of social and political behavior, political tolerance, and anyone who has an interest in the contributions made by Sullivan.

1

A TRIBUTE TO THE LEGACY OF JOHN L. SULLIVAN

Christopher M. Federico, Eugene Borgida, and Joanne M. Miller

Source: Courtesy of Authors.

A few years ago, when our colleague John L. Sullivan informed us of his impending retirement, the three of us began talking about how to best honor him and his legacy. John is an incredibly humble man; a large party with speeches would have surely made him uncomfortable. But he has had too big of an impact on the discipline and the careers of generations of scholars (including ours) for us to let his retirement pass without comment. Thus, in 2015, we invited a small subset of those scholars to contribute essays to a volume reflecting on his legacy. With this volume, we offer a tribute to both John L. Sullivan the man and his peerless legacy as a social scientist. Though controversies have come and gone both for political psychology and for our contributors since we first solicited these essays 5 years ago, what has remained constant is Sullivan’s positive impact on the field.¹

For our own part, it has been a blessing and an honor to be John’s colleagues and friends for many years. The three of us hail from different generations, and some of us have known John longer than others. However, we can all testify in equal degree to the overwhelming importance of his contributions to the interdisciplinary field of political psychology. Since the 1970s, his work has brought together theory and methodologies from both political science and psychology to transform the way we think about the nature of political tolerance and the essence of ideological belief systems in mass publics. John’s scholarship has loomed large over political psychology in the last four decades, and his influence on the enterprise has been considerable as the field has expanded and evolved over that time.

In assembling the contributions included in this testament to John and his legacy, we had two goals in mind. First, we wanted to showcase contemporary research that exemplifies and illustrates the influence of John’s work on the study of tolerance and belief systems. To this end, we asked a number of distinguished political psychologists to write about their own research and the ways in which it has been influenced and inspired by John’s scientific contributions. These chapters paint a vivid portrait of John’s enduring downstream influence on the direction of research in several core areas of inquiry within political psychology. Second, we also wanted to highlight John’s personal influence as a mentor to several generations’ worth of PhD students—many of whom have gone on to achieve distinction as political psychologists in their own right. Thus, we have asked several of John’s advisees from over the years to reflect more personally on John’s impact as a mentor on their own careers and on political psychology more broadly. We were interested both in anecdotes about John from our contributors’ graduate school days, as well as their interactions with him since then. These chapters testify to John’s warmth and talent as a molder of future scholars and teachers.

The contributors included in this volume come from a variety of backgrounds. Befitting political psychology’s reputation as an interdisciplinary enterprise, they hail from a variety of homes within the social and behavioral sciences. Though many are based in John’s lifelong home discipline of political science, others have spent their life in social psychology; indeed, the three of us straddle these two disciplines in terms of our own training and academic appointments. Within these disciplines, our contributors’ intellectual interests are quite varied as well. Many of them have continued to develop our psychological understanding of political tolerance and its role in democratic life, whereas others have focused more strongly on how ideology informs (or does not inform) the structure of citizens’ political attitudes and beliefs. Finally, our contributors are an international group, originating from or working not only in the United States, but a variety of other nations as well. Importantly, this diverse group of scholars has extended John’s core insights to the study of mass politics in national contexts as varied as Denmark, Israel, Poland, and South Africa.

We hope that these chapters convey the significance of John’s life and work for political psychology in a manner worthy of their subject. At the end of this short introduction, we provide an overview of the contributions included in the present volume. Before doing so, however, we offer a few brief words about John and his career.

John L. Sullivan: A Life in Political Psychology

John L. Sullivan came into this world on August 21, 1945, the fourth of Charles David Sullivan and Gladys Elizabeth Sullivan’s five children. He was born and raised in the town of Albert Lea in southern Minnesota, where he lived until he began his higher education at the University of Minnesota in the mid-1960s. After receiving his BA in 1967, he decamped for the University of North Carolina, where he was reunited with his undergraduate friends James Stimson and Paul Wellstone (later of United States [US] Senate fame) who were a year ahead of John in the North Carolina political science graduate program; John completed a PhD in political science there in 1970. After spending time as a post-doctoral fellow in the Departments of Psychology and Political Science at Yale University, he took on appointments in the Departments of Statistics and Political Science at Iowa State University (from 1971 to 1972) and the Department of Political Science at Indiana University (from 1972 to 1975).

In 1975, he returned to his home state’s flagship institution of higher education, the University of Minnesota, where he remained on the faculty in the Department of Political Science for the remainder of his career. Over the course of his long, distinguished tenure there, he received numerous honors, including both undergraduate and graduate teaching awards and the Department of Political Science’s Arleen Carlson chair in American Government and Politics. In 1999, he was recognized with a Regents Professorship, the highest honor the University of Minnesota bestows upon its faculty. Shortly thereafter, in 2002, John was also recognized with the Harold Lasswell Award, the International Society of Political Psychology’s lifetime achievement award for distinguished scientific contributions. In 2007, John was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After an illustrious 31 years on the Minnesota faculty, he retired in 2016.

John is perhaps best known for his work on political tolerance. The general topic of rights and civil liberties was of great importance to post-war social scientists, as evident in works as diverse as Adorno et al.’s (1950) The Authoritarian Personality and Stouffer’s (1955) Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties. The issue of tolerance had of course been a lively and consequential one in the wake of the totalitarian regimes of the mid-twentieth century, as well as the rise of McCarthyism on the US domestic scene in the 1950s. The same issues again came to the fore as John’s career in political science began, during an era of protests over civil rights and Vietnam. The foundational works of the era provided abundant evidence that many citizens were unwilling to extend procedural rights to “non-normative” political groups, especially those on the left (McClosky 1964; Prothro and Grigg 1960; Stouffer 1955). These works also placed a great deal of emphasis on the role of education in promoting support for civil liberties, commonly finding those with lower levels of formal education were less committed to tolerant principles.

John’s great contribution to this literature was to clarify a longstanding point of theoretical and methodological confusion about the nature of tolerance: The difference between disliking members of a group and refusing to extend civil liberties to that group. The most important studies of the era simply identified different groups and asked survey respondents whether members of those groups should be permitted certain rights: “Do you think Communists have the right to hold a meeting in your town?” John argued that questions of this type were fundamentally flawed as measures of tolerance, in that they probably best distinguished those who disliked a group from those with less-aversive attitudes toward it. Thus, researchers’ estimates of how tolerant the public and specific segments of it were may have effectively depended on which groups were the target of inquiry. Respondents asked about less-popular groups (such as Communists in the 1950s) would have looked intolerant indeed. Moreover, if some strata within society—such as those lower in educational attainment—especially disliked the target groups in question, this would show up in the form of greater intolerance.

John’s innovative solution to this conundrum was the “least-liked group” methodology. Rather than asking about specific groups (Communists, the Ku Klux Klan), John and his colleagues suggested asking each respondent about the group he or she liked least. That way, one might eliminate biases that come from asking about some target groups rather than others—or targets that some members of the population felt more negatively about than others. Besides facilitating the measurement of political tolerance, this approach also clarified the concept itself by emphasizing that the “true” test of tolerance was a willingness to respect the civil liberties of those one liked the least.

This innovative approach culminated in what is perhaps John’s most well-known and important piece of scholarship, Political Tolerance and American Democracy (co-authored with James Piereson and George Marcus, in 1982). Besides revolutionizing the assessment of tolerance in mass publics, it also led political scientists to adjust some of their most important preconceptions about who is tolerant. To return to an example cited above, John and his colleagues found that use of the least-liked group methodology drastically reduced the tendency for those lower in education (and social class) to display less tolerance. Instead, they found that the most important predictors of tolerance were psychological in nature: Individuals were less likely to extend tolerance to their least-liked groups when they felt more threatened by those groups and when they reported lower self-esteem and greater dogmatism. This landmark study now stands as one of the seminal works in political behavior on the nature of tolerance, a reputation it has retained over three decades up to the present. In recognition of its long-term significance, the book received the 2006 Philip Converse Award from the American Political Science Association’s Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section.

Not content to focus only on America, John and his colleagues extended the least-liked group approach internationally in a follow-up study, Political Tolerance in Context: Support for Unpopular Minorities in Israel, New Zealand, and the United States (co-authored with Michal Shamir, Nigel Roberts, and Patrick Walsh, in 1985). Impressively, their results indicated that the basic theoretical model and techniques John and his colleagues developed previously in the American context traveled well to other shores. Once individuals’ least-liked groups were taken into account, variables related to psychological insecurity and group threat again emerged as the strongest predictors of intolerance, though John and his colleagues noted contextual differences in the nature of the group threats citizens were most concerned about.

The 1990s saw the arrival of the last entry in John’s tolerance “trilogy,” With Malice Toward Some (co-authored by George Marcus, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, and Sandra Wood, in 1995). In this study, John and his colleagues further mapped out the psychological bases of political tolerance. They again found that enduring characteristics—such as a tendency to experience threat, support for democratic values, and “standing decisions” about least-liked groups—contribute to tolerance. However, they also found that context matters. In particular, making citizens more aware of non-normative behavior by target groups reduces tolerance. Similarly, making rights to self-expression salient increases tolerance, whereas making the goal of social order salient reduces it. With Malice Toward Some proved to be as influential as its predecessors, and it was soon awarded the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Political Psychology Section in recognition of its contribution.

John was not content to allow his insights about political tolerance to languish in the halls of the academy, either. He and his colleagues wanted to use these insights to inform civic education and promote tolerance in rising generations of students. To this end, he and many co-workers put many years of work into the development of a curriculum for high school students, Tolerance for Diversity of Belief (1993). The materials he helped develop for this curriculum are used both locally and nationally, and he has personally helped train teachers in their use. Thus, John’s contribution to the cause of democratic values and civil liberties extends well beyond the abstract and scientific.

Though John is perhaps best known for his profound contributions to the literature on political tolerance, he has also left his mark on other key areas of inquiry in political psychology and political behavior. A case in point is the study of mass belief systems. One of the most important findings in twentieth-century public-opinion research was the discovery that relatively few citizens adopt ideologically congruent positions on different issues or think about politics in terms of the liberal-conservative dimension. This finding, detailed most famously in The American Voter (Campbell et al. 1960) and in Philip Converse’s (1964) classic book chapter on “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” inspired decades of debate. Later works took issue with the pessimistic conclusions of the “Michigan School” of scholars like Campbell, Converse, and their colleagues, suggesting that previous work had underestimated the proportion of “ideologues” in the mass public (e.g., Hagner and Pierce 1982) or failed to take into account the role of measurement error in determining the extent to which citizens adopted ideologically consistent issue positions (e.g., Achen 1975). Despite this back-and-forth, the latest surveys of this literature suggest that Campbell et al. (1960) and Converse (1964) were right to describe much of the public as “innocent of ideology” (Kinder and Kalmoe 2017).

The study of belief systems was—and is—not without its unanswered questions, though. Over the years, John and his colleagues deployed innovative methods in an effort to address these questions. One set of issues arises from the fact that most work on belief systems assumes only one “valid” way for citizens to organize their political attitudes—i.e., in terms of a single left-right dimension. Though some scholars had provided qualitative evidence that individuals may organize their beliefs according to idiosyncratic, but logical frameworks (e.g., Lane 1962), by the 1970s, no one had attempted to quantitatively study individual differences in the structure of belief systems—or reconcile the possibility of individual differences with the existence of shared political belief systems. In 1974, George Marcus, John, and David Tabb helped fill this gap in an important paper in the American Journal of Political Science. Using individual-differences scaling, they found that citizens characterized politics in terms of three common dimensions (i.e., order versus dissent, majority rule versus minority rights, patriotism versus violent dissent), but weighted these dimensions differently when making political judgments. Thus, while individuals draw on a common set of ideological dimensions, they differ from one another in which dimensions they use. As John and his colleagues noted, focusing only on common dimensions without explicitly modeling individual variability in how they are used overlooks idiosyncratic (but orderly) ways of reasoning about politics, making the average person’s political attitudes look “noisier” than they actually are.

Around the same time, John and his colleagues also developed novel ways of making sense of apparent changes in the American public’s level of ideological sophistication. Starting in the 1970s, a number of researchers began to report an uptick in signs of reliance on ideology in the mass public. Among other things, survey respondents appeared to display more ideological consistency in their issue attitudes and a stronger tendency to conceptualize politics in terms of ideological abstractions like liberalism and conservatism (e.g., Nie and Anderson 1974; Nie, Verba, and Petrocik 1976). These apparent shifts led some to argue that the heady politics of the 1960s—marked by conflicts over civil rights and Vietnam and “ideological” candidacies like that of Barry Goldwater—had made lines of political conflict starker than they were in the relatively quiescent 1950s, encouraging the mass public to adopt more coherent beliefs.

However, John and his colleagues argued that this apparent increase in ideological sophistication might be due to a more subtle d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• 1 A Tribute to the Legacy of John L. Sullivan
• PART I The Sullivan Legacy in Tolerance Research
• PART II The Sullivan Legacy in Belief-Systems Research
• PART III Sullivan as Mentor
• PART IV Coda
• Index