Professional Endorsements Signal Authoritarian Indexes

A specific form of institutional endorsement (e.g., medical societies’ guidance on gender‑affirming care) can be empirically associated with measures of ideological authoritarianism and with expressed willingness to justify political violence, even after controlling for partisan identity. That suggests some professional recommendations function as political signals as well as clinical statements, and that measurement choices in research (scales, sampling) critically shape the public controversy. — If professional society positions systematically correlate with authoritarian attitudes and violence justification, debates over clinical guidance become debates about institutional legitimacy and democratic risk, affecting trust in medicine and policy.