Tolerance for the Free Speech of Outgroup Partisans

Abstract

Americans consistently express broad levels of support for free speech and free expression. For example, 87% of respondents in a recent survey reported that freedom of speech is “very” or “extremely” personally important (Knight Foundation 2022). Moreover, this support seemingly transcends party lines, with 91% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats endorsing this importance.1 Yet, there are reasons to be skeptical that broad levels of support translate to on-theground tolerance of free speech. There are numerous historical examples of Americans’ willingness to selectively withdraw First Amendment protections to those deemed undeserving, particularly along racial, ethnic, and ideological dimensions (King and Smith 2005). Additionally, people are far less likely to tolerate and extend rights to members of their “least-liked” group, especially when threatened (Lambert and Chasteen 1997; Marcus et al. 1995; McClosky and Chong 1985; Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley 1997). Therefore, we are left to wonder what to make of these strong endorsements that Americans continue to give regarding First Amendment protections. One reason to be skeptical about these declarations of support for free speech is that these endorsements lack tradeoffs and are socially desirable. These low-stakes features could inflate levels of overall public support for civil rights protections. In practice, however, questions related to rights typically do not ask whether a constitutionally protected right should exist. Instead, debates often center on the scope of those rights and/or the groups to whom those protections extend. Creating an additional complication is that beliefs about freedom of speech—and other related rights—can be politicized along partisan lines. Democrats and Republicans could differ significantly in defining First Amendment rights and the values they attach to them based on the object they seek to defend. For example, the previously cited Knight Foundation (2022) report noted that partisans differ substantially in their belief about whether spreading misinformation or hate speech online should be a protected form of speech. To test the limits of Americans’ commitment to free speech, we relied on two survey experiments that were designed expressly to assess whether broad commitments to speech change when tradeoffs or costs to that speech are introduced, as well as whether those speech protections extend to partisan groups. The first experiment focused on broad support for free speech; the second concerned views of free speech on college campuses. The studies yielded four broad conclusions: (1) in the absence of tradeoffs, support for free speech was high; (2) Republicans expressed greater support for free speech than Democrats; (3) the introduction of tradeoffs altered support for free speech and did so similarly for Democrats and Republicans; and (4) support for free speech did not depend on whether partisan in-groups or out-groups engaged in the speech. The survey experiments were included in the Knight Foundation–Ipsos Study from the Knight Free Expression Research Series (Knight Foundation 2022). This was an omnibus project that convened teams of scholars who were interested in studying questions related to Americans’ views of free speech and expression. The survey was nationally representative and also included an oversample of nonwhite adults and college students. The experiments described in this article included approximately 2,500 participants (Carlos, Sheagley, and Taylor 2022).2