Can Populist Partisanship Drive Conspiratorial Beliefs?

• In Event: Populism

Abstract

Mainstream populist parties increasingly use conspiracy theories to rally popular support and to discredit political opponents around the world. For example, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro suggested that NGOs protecting the environment set fires in the Amazon because they have been losing money while U.S. President Donald Trump endorsed baseless claims that the Clinton family killed over 50 people. Given the prevalence of conspiracy theories in mainstream populist politicians’ discourse and given scholarly literature showing that partisanship shapes information processing, I ask whether and how populist partisanship structures individuals’ willingness to believe in conspiracy theories.

Under what conditions does populist partisanship shape whether individuals believe in conspiracy theories? Do individuals process conspiracy theories like other political information in a biased way through partisan lenses? Are populist partisans more likely to believe in all conspiracy theories, or simply the ones endorsed by their party?

In this paper, I show that populist partisanship is associated with a higher likelihood in believing in conspiracy theories endorsed by their populist party. Using panel data from Poland, I find that when compared to supporters of non-populist parties and non-partisans, supporters of a right-wing populist party are more likely to believe in a conspiracy theory about the causes of a plane crash, which killed about 95 Polish officials in 2010. Furthermore, I show that individuals who switch to supporting this populist party become more likely to believe in this conspiracy theory.

I also leverage cross-national survey data from Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, which contains information on partisanship and beliefs in conspiracy theories that have and have not been politicized in these contexts. Using this data, I show that far right partisans are more likely to believe in all conspiracy theories regardless of whether their party endorses these conspiracies. However, populist partisans are only more likely to believe in the conspiracy theories endorsed by their party, rather than conspiracy theories writ large.

My analysis suggests that populist partisanship impacts the degree to which individuals believe in specific types of conspiracy theories. How populist partisans process information about conspiracy theories appears to operate like other, standard types of political information.

Author

• Courtney Blackington, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill