ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how citizens go about the process of making actual choices related to issues of tolerance on specific occasions. Expressly political choices are characteristically normatively two-sided because they offer a choice between core values of competing orientations toward politics. In contrast, the model of political choice we are developing specifies the character of the connections among the three primary terms—values acquired through the course of socialisation, values invoked on an occasion of choice, and cognitive sophistication as indexed by education. Choices about tolerance considered in its own right are normatively one-sided. Variation in response to issues of tolerance, obviously enough, runs across both individuals and across situations. Education can promote racial tolerance directly by promoting its acquisition as a value in its own right. The 'Open Housing' experiment is specifically designed to explore the dynamics of issues of tolerance when they come into play.
