/r/politics generally has a longer leash, actually. I was permabanned from /r/politicaldiscussion after reposting a modified ~1000 word or so post that originally included questions and had been removed for being "low investment" (the repost included substantial editing and more questions), and when someone said "this is a repost of someone else's thread" I said politely that it had been removed for being low investment and this was a modified version that I hoped was OK with the mods... mods deleted my comment as meta conversation, I replied back that it was hard not to answer such a direct question that implied I was committing plagiarism, got a 5 day ban for the reply being meta conversation, PM'ed the mod apologizing politely and briefly, got a 30 day ban and a message not to PM the mod again and to do everything through modmail, made the mistake of replying "OK, I'll do that, again really sorry" and got a permanent ban. Whole thing happened in the span of a few minutes. Was hard not to feel like it didn't reflect some personal animus on the mod's part (I'd had one prior incident where someone complained about the sub rules, a mod engaged them a bit on it, I offered my views at moderate length, and after a brief exchange the mod banned me for a day, which I disagreed with but didn't lose my head over).

My sense is that in /r/politics the mods seem a lot less rigid. They do seem to have become pretty aggressive with respect to incivility as the campaign has gone on, but frankly it's hard to blame them for that and they seem to be more judicious with bans. They certainly are a lot more willing to tolerate criticism of the sub or its policies (there may be some meta-heavy comments that get deleted, for all I know, but a lot stay up and the hand definitely isn't as heavy as it is in r/politicaldiscussion).