Conceptualizing Political Illiberalism: A Long Overdue Index of Illiberal Political Values

Abstract There is an urgent need to study illiberal political values. However, current efforts have focused on democratic values, democratic support, populist attitudes, and authoritarian values. Consequently, they have missed something older and more fundamental, namely, political illiberalism. Hence, I pave the way for future inquiries by proposing and validating a composite measure built upon a reverse engineering of political illiberalism from existing works on illiberal democracy, political intolerance, and the normative philosophy of political liberalism. Through quantitative psycho-political analysis (i.e., factor analysis, internal reliability tests, and basic descriptive statistics), I posit and dissect an index responding to the limits of existing ones. Overall, I define illiberal political values as a value system constituted by intolerant and leader-centric values tied with anti-institutionalist tendencies.