Moralizing narrative loyalty: authoritarian legitimation in the Central Sahel

How do authoritarian rulers preserve justificatory authority when performance is contested? Existing research explains coercion, legal closure, information control, and sovereigntist legitimation, but says less about the conditions under which deference to an official account becomes a criterion of civic worth. This article defines moralizing narrative loyalty as a regime-side mechanism through which authorities valorize deference, stigmatize verification or contradiction, and attach institutional consequences to that distinction. Moralized authoritarianism denotes the configuration sustained by cognitive, normative, emotional, and symbolic relays. A source-traceable documentary comparison treats Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger as nested illustrations within a Central Sahel cluster and Ghana’s 2020 COVID-19 response as a matched negative probe. The applications assess the framework, not prevalence or public uptake. A claim-evidence map records rivals, counterevidence, and inferential limits. Mali yields qualified evidence; Burkina Faso presents a conjunction compatible with the mechanism, although narrative specificity and the role of coercion remain unresolved; Niger meets more components of the diagnostic threshold in its 2025 charter phase, while the link between chartered civic virtues and deference to one account remains partly inferential; Ghana is excluded because contestation, independent verification, and legal reversal remained operative. The framework distinguishes regime strategy from reception, legitimacy, and stabilization.