An A320 was forced to refuse to accept an aircraft with a chronic ADR failure history in order to get maintenance to anything other than 'reset' it; as had been done with the previous writeups; and write it off as fixed.

Narrative

While still at the gate the First Officer noticed his PFD was not receiving any altitude information from ADR 2. This was a chronic write up with the fix in the past being to reset the circuit breakers and when the altitude data returned sign off the write up. The technician came up to the plane and did just that and was ready to release the plane. I stated that I was not satisfied with the fix; since this was a repetitive problem that resetting the circuit breakers was not fixing the actual problem. If the ADR 2 on this aircraft is inoperative you cannot enter RVSM airspace and you are left with a single channel feeding the aircraft barometric information. I was not comfortable with those situations. I wanted a new ADR installed. To do this I had to refuse the aircraft. I believe this situation; which is now common at our airline; is unsafe. Making the Captain refuse an aircraft just to have it properly repaired leads to undue pressure on the Captain to fly an aircraft with known unresolved problems. If I took my car into the shop and week after week was told it was fixed after the shop reset the module; only to have the same problem occur again and again I would certainly not consider the car actually fixed. So why does our Maintenance at times operate that way? The ADR was replaced and no problems were noted during the flight.