A study of 365 metropolitan areas across the US concluded that Ithaca was one of the most tolerant cities.
The study included a survey of 4,000 individuals, but relied heavily on predictive model that relied on age, gender, race, education, and religion.
The authors said this was not about liberal vs conservative, instead it was focused on who is most accepting of people with opposing viewpoints.
Over the past several years, political divisions and intolerance for opposing viewpoints has been on the rise. According to data from Pew Research, political support for a president of an opposing party was traditionally in the mid 30s to high 40s. In the early 1990s, for example, Democrat support of George HW. Bush averaged about 44 percent. Nearly 20 years later during the Obama administration, however, Republican support for Obama ranged at about 14 percent.
Evidence suggests that things have only gotten worse during the Trump administration. A Wakefield survey of couples concluded that 10 percent of American ending their relationships because of politics and a third of Americans would consider getting a divorce if their spouse supported Donald Trump.
A Recent Study Suggests That Ithaca Is Very Politically Tolerant
Researchers Christopher Claassen of the University of Glasgow and James Gibson of Washington University in St. Louis conducted a study to assess political tolerance in 365 metropolitan areas across the country. Ithaca, alongside several college towns, was ranked as one of the most tolerant metro areas.
Claassen said that while some of the analysis of Ithaca came from Freedom and Tolerance survey data from 2007–2011, most of it came from a statistical model called multilevel regression with post-stratification.
“There were a few respondents from Ithaca, however, our sample was not nearly large enough to only use these people to measure the tolerance of the Ithaca MSA,” he said. “Instead, we used a statistical model.”
Claassen argues that the model, which was used by other researchers to predict Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, is a reliable method of making polling data of a small sample size more representative of larger populations. He said it works by essentially finding patterns among certain groups of paper and using those patterns to estimate how the rest of those groups of people within a population think.
“This model was used to predict the level of political tolerance for 70,000 demographic by geographic categories, and these were then combined according to the census results for each MSA to create a MSA-level measure of tolerance,” he said. “Other people developed this statistical method a few years ago and have shown that it produces pretty accurate forecasts.”
So What Makes Ithaca So Tolerant?
Claassen said that a big part of the reason Ithaca is so tolerant is likely because of the large college presence in the area. The MSA data indicates that college students in Ithaca are very accepting of differing political beliefs compared to other metro areas that are very tolerant.
Some may suggest that there is a correlation between ideology and political tolerance, but Claassen said that is not the case. He said that some of the most liberal cities in the country such as Chicago and New York City are not very politically tolerant. And while much of the South is intolerant, there are a lot of conservative areas further west yha.
That being said, just because an area is considered “politically tolerant” does not mean that there is not intolerance in that given area. Classen said that intolerance exists everywhere, just in varying degrees.
“Most Americans support restricting the political rights of one group or another – usually extreme or fringe groups, whether from the left or the right,” he said. “As such, it makes sense that even in areas that are generally more tolerant, there is still some intolerance toward particular groups.”