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Category: Project

Description: How severely must a political candidate transgress in order to lose votes from supporters? Using a novel method for varying levels of transgression severity parametrically, the current study modeled the relationship between ingroup candidate transgression severity and voter choice to identify 1) the point of severity people abandon political ingroup members and vote for the outgroup, and 2) Potential ideological differences in this relationship. The hypothesized relationship emerged: people voted for their ingroup candidate, not discriminating between transgressions, until a level of severity was reached. After this threshold, people continuously voted for the outgroup candidate. Further, Republicans possessed a higher severity threshold than Democrats, such that they voted for the ingroup candidate for more severe transgressions than Democrats.