Moralized authoritarian governance: Theory, measurement, and empirical evidence from comparative case studies

Gouvernance autoritaire moralisée: Théorie, mesure et preuves empiriques issues d’études de cas comparatives

Etienne Fakaba Sissoko ()
Additional contact information
Etienne Fakaba Sissoko: Université des sciences sociales et de gestion de Bamako - USSGB - Université des sciences sociales et de gestion de Bamako, CRAPES MALI - Centre de Recherche et d'Analyses Politiques, Economiques et Sociales du Mali, Faculté des Sciences économiques et de Gestion - USSGB - Université des sciences sociales et de gestion de Bamako

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This article proposes an empirical instrument designed to measure a dimension of authoritarian stabilization that has often been overlooked: the institutional moralization of civic norms. Existing indices of democracy and governance primarily focus on the procedural, legal, or performance-based dimensions of political power, and therefore capture only imperfectly those configurations in which moral loyalty to the official narrative tends to supersede factual verification as a criterion of citizenship.To render this phenomenon empirically observable, the study develops the Moral Inversion Index (MII), a composite indicator based on four analytical dimensions-cognitive, normative, emotional, and symbolic-and constructed exclusively from observable institutional traces such as legal norms, official speeches, and symbolic political devices. The construction of the index follows an explicit methodological procedure including the operationalization of indicators, their normalization, and robustness tests ensuring the reproducibility of the measurement.The results show that the MII captures an analytical dimension distinct from the dominant indices of democracy and governance, providing complementary information on forms of authoritarian legitimation grounded in the moralization of civic expectations. The article thus contributes to the comparative analysis of authoritarianism by proposing an empirical instrument that makes it possible to study institutional configurations in which morality becomes an infrastructure of government.

Keywords: rent-seeking; composite index JEL Codes D72 -Political processes D73 -Corruption; comparative measurement; authoritarian governance; political legitimation; moral inversion; and empirical evidence from comparative case studies. CRAPES moralized authoritarianism; and governance H11 -Structure; and empirical evidence from comparative case studies. CRAPES moralized authoritarianism moral inversion political legitimation authoritarian governance comparative measurement composite index JEL Codes D72 -Political processes D73 -Corruption; measurement; Theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03-05
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05537303v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05537303v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-05537303

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().