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]

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.