Perceptions of Political Deviants in the U.S. Democratic and Republican Parties

People who deviate from group norms pose problems for their ingroup, but not all forms are deviance are equivalent. Four experiments (N=1,063) investigated whether people hold a lay understanding of these subjective group dynamics by assessing people’s beliefs about how others would perceive two types of deviants within U.S. political parties—political moderates and extremes. Participants thought both Democrats (Experiment 1) and Republicans (Experiment 2) would view moderate political candidates more negatively (e.g., less loyal, less principled, less typical, and more likely to defect) than extreme candidates. Moreover, these relatively negative evaluations of moderates extended to rank and file members of the Democratic (Experiment 3) and Republican (Experiment 4) Parties. These findings suggest that people intuitively understand subjective group dynamics and, when applied to politics, this understanding may have important consequences for how people with moderate and extreme beliefs engage in political discourse.