THE THRESHOLD THAT MOVES: Political Tolerance for Authoritarian-Linked Leadership, and What the Concentration Stage of This Corpus's Political-Activation Sequence Should Expect to Elect

This paper examines three recent and one older instance of the same electoral pattern — Keiko Fujimori's razor-thin victory in Peru's 2026 presidential runoff, José Antonio Kast's landslide victory in Chile's 2025 election, and Park Geun-hye's 2012 election and 2017 impeachment in South Korea — to formalize a concept this paper calls the political tolerance threshold: the level of documented authoritarian association, corruption, or institutional violation an electorate will accept in a candidate in exchange for a credible promise to resolve a visible, currently unresolved crisis, typically crime, disorder, or institutional paralysis. The concept is not proposed from scratch. It is grounded in three existing literatures this paper brings into direct contact: Loxton and Mainwaring's authoritarian successor party framework, which documents that parties descended from dictatorships have been voted back into office in over half of the world's post-transition democracies; Huntington's mobilization-institutionalization gap, which predicts rising demand for order specifically when social mobilization outpaces institutional capacity; and the retrospective-sociotropic voting literature, which shows electorates evaluate candidates by expected crisis-resolution capacity rather than by comparative biographical cleanliness. The three cases, read together rather than singly, show the threshold is not a fixed cultural trait but a variable with at least three determinants: the intensity of the currently visible crisis, the margin of victory as a signal of whether crossing the threshold reflects broad consensus or narrow, reluctant acceptance, and the durability of the institutions available to reverse the choice if it fails — Park Geun-hye's impeachment demonstrates the threshold, once crossed, remains subject to correction through the same democratic machinery that crossed it, rather than being a one-way ratchet. The paper's second contribution connects this finding directly to this corpus's own forward-looking apparatus. Till Death Tear Us Apart and The Chain Completed formalize a Grief–Attribution–Legitimation–Concentration sequence in which visible, attributed, non-resolving exclusion from longevity-relevant biological intervention culminates in Concentration: legitimated grievance organizing into political force capable of confronting the governance structure it holds responsible. That apparatus has, to this point, treated Concentration's political character as an open variable, addressed only through the separate question of whether the confronted structure is independently intact, breaking down, or caught in Huntington's gap — the three branches The Chain Completed states without resolving. This paper argues the political-tolerance-threshold literature supplies a missing specification of what Concentration is empirically likely to elect, in any of the three branches, once it does organize: not generically "political force," but, under exactly the visibility and attribution conditions this corpus's own A5 apparatus predicts will obtain, force with elevated tolerance for order-promising leadership over procedurally clean leadership — a specification with an unwelcome implication for the Reform branch specifically, which this corpus's prior work has implicitly treated as the safe outcome relative to Disruption or Stalemate. The paper states this implication as a hypothesis with explicit falsification conditions, not as a settled addition to the corpus.