Authoritarian Pulse: A Model for Measuring Left- and Right-Wing Discursive Authoritarianism in Presidential Publications on X

Abstract

For decades, research on authoritarianism focused almost exclusively on its right-wing variant (RWA), relegating the systematic study of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) to a marginal position that has only recently begun to be reversed. This imbalance has left political science without analytical frameworks capable of classifying and comparing, within a single instrument, the discursive authoritarianism of both ideological orientations a critical limitation in a context in which Latin American presidents of both left and right employ the platform X as a privileged channel of communication. This article proposes Authoritarian Pulse, an integrated scale ranging from -5 to +5 that unifies the classification of left- and right-wing discursive authoritarianism across five analytical dimensions, designed for the monthly measurement of presidential discourse on X. The instrument was applied to the publications of Petro, Boric, Sheinbaum, Noboa, Bukele, and Milei during February 2026, using the Gemini Flash 2.5 API in two sequential phases: ideological filtering and classification on the scale. The findings reveal that Petro and Sheinbaum are located in the progressive left (mode -2), Milei in the right with incipient authoritarian features (mode +3), Boric as the most pluralist profile in the corpus, and Bukele as a case of ideological ambiguity that challenges conventional taxonomies, confirming the instrument’s capacity to discriminate between authoritarian variants of different orientations on a single axis.