Tolerance is an important concept in democratic theory and a recurring issue in British history. With rare exceptions, however, conclusions about tolerance in Britain have been based on impressionistic rather than empirical evidence. Only a few research studies have addressed the subject of tolerance in Britain, and none has collected nationwide data on attitudinal tolerance among the British.

This Note examines patterns of attitudinal tolerance in Britain and speculates about the impact of those patterns on the status of political freedom in Britain. The analysis is based on recently collected survey data on attitudinal tolerance among members of the public and Members of Parliament in Britain.

In this article, we present data showing that national legislators are more tolerant than the public in Britain, Israel, New Zealand and the United States. Two explanations for this phenomenon are presented and assessed. The first is the selective recruitment of Members of Parliament, Knesset and Congress from among those in the electorate whose demographic, ideological and personality characteristics predispose them to be tolerant. Although this process does operate in all four countries, it is insufficient to explain all of the differences in tolerance between elites and the public in at least three countries. The second explanation relies on a process of explicitly political socialization, leading to differences in tolerance between elites and their public that transcend individual-level, personal characteristics. Relying on our analysis of political tolerance among legislators in the four countries, we suggest how this process of political socialization may be operating.

In this article, we test the thesis that legislators' cue-taking varies by policy area, using data collected in interviews with 99 members of the House of Representatives in the fall of 1987. They were asked to rate the importance of 11 different cue-givers—staff, party leaders, committee chairs, ranking minority members, state party delegation, other party colleagues, media, organized groups, constituents, president, and bureaucracy—in six different policy areas—agricultural, foreign, defense, social welfare, budget and economics, and civil rights. Operationalizing cue-taking differences by comparing legislators' mean ratings across both cue-givers and policy areas, we use analysis of variance techniques to find significant differences by both policy area and cue-givers. The pattern of differences varies for Democrats and Republicans.

Political freedom is relatively secure in both Britain and the United States. Its foundations, however, are obscure. We explore four possibilities: (1) that tolerant attitudes are widely held by members of the general public; (2) that those who hold intolerant views are unlikely to act on their beliefs; (3) that tolerant attitudes are widely held by members of the political elite; and (4) that constitutional organization plays a salutary role in the protection of political freedom. We conclude that neither public tolerance nor public apathy is a promising source of political freedom in either Britain or the United States. The critical underpinnings of political freedom in both countries, we conclude, seem to be elite tolerance and constitutional organization.