Abstract:  Illiberal leaders—sometimes called strongmen—often campaign on being more effective. The tradeoff presented to citizens is straightforward: they promise to cut through the indecisiveness and gridlock of democratic debate and give people what they want. Such leaders often use the rhetoric of economic grievances, corruption, and redistribution, but do they follow through on those promises? We answer this question using data from 38,557 speeches by 381 leaders in 120 countries between 1998 and 2024, combined with economic indicators from the World Bank and V-Dem measures on regime type and resource inequality. Utilizing a machine learning approach, we employ BERT language models that place leaders’ speeches on two continuous dimensions measuring liberal–illiberal speech and left–right economic positions. We test whether illiberals are more effective at translating their economic preferences into material changes. We show that illiberal leaders do deliver the goods—but only when they are on the economic right and only in the direction of greater economic inequality. Illiberals resemble populists because they engage in the rhetoric of cultural exclusion, but they do not push a distributional policy that benefits most citizens. The policy preferences of illiberal leftists, on the other hand, have no apparent effect. This article makes methodological contributions by building a one-dimensional scale for measuring the economic left–right positions of political leaders. This article also contributes to our understanding of the pernicious effects of illiberal leaders in deepening economic inequality.

Keywords:  authoritarian; BERT language models; democracy; economic inequality; illiberal; material distribution; populism; strong leader; strongman; text analysis

Published:   29 May 2025

Issue:   Vol 13 (2025): Illiberal Politics in Europe (In Progress)