The Theoretical Architecture of Core Emotion Framework Political Science: Charisma, Polarization, and Leadership Failure in States of Operational Fusion

This paper advances a unified affective computational architecture for political psychology by applying the Core Emotion Framework (CEF) to the domains of charisma, polarization, and leadership failure. Whereas traditional discrete and dimensional models compress political affect into coarse categories or low dimensional valence–arousal spaces, the CEF models political behavior as structured sequences of ten functional emotional operators distributed across the Head, Heart, and Gut centers. Using this operator calculus, the paper formalizes political charisma as a multiplicative interaction of Expanding, Achieving, and Boosting, stabilized by a threshold level of Accepting that prevents somatic friction and expressive collapse. The framework then models affective polarization as a set of infectious microstates—such as Political Outrage, Tribal Loyalty, and the Polarization Spiral—each defined by rigid operator loops that resist cognitive persuasion. Finally, the paper introduces a fusion based taxonomy of leadership failure, demonstrating how chronic operator entanglements (e.g., Calculating–Sensing, Achieving–Constricting, Boosting–Achieving) produce predictable patterns of indecision, authoritarian drift, burnout, and scandal mismanagement. Together, these contributions establish the CEF political program as a rigorous, computationally grounded paradigm for analyzing political behavior, debate performance, voter contagion, and executive collapse. Readers should confirm political information with trusted sources. Keywords: Core Emotion Framework (CEF); operator functionalism; structural constructivist affective science; political charisma; affective polarization; leadership failure; somatic cognition; emotional operators; fusion states; debate performance; voter microstates; computational political psychology; charisma algebra; somatic perturbation modeling; executive collapse; psychophysiological validation; political behavior architecture.