Memory, Religion, and Conspiracy: The Politics of Narrative in East Europe

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Identity and narrative play a prominent role in the toolkit of politicians seeking to mobilize support through deeply held religious, cultural, or historical identities. These appeals can bolster regime-created disinformation campaigns, rally wartime publics, and yield electoral support for those parties who invoke these frames. However, political actors do not weaponize narratives alone. Religious officials sometimes bandwagon with politicians to push historical and conspiratorial narratives that align with their doctrinal beliefs, imbuing those conspiracies and politicians with a sense of moral authority.

When and how do political and religious elites co-opt narratives to garner different types of political benefits? Do such appeals vary by target outcome: rallying wartime support, gaining votes, or spreading political disinformation? Do different types of elites use these strategies differently? If religiosity corresponds with conspiratorial beliefs, which aspects of religiosity underlie this correlation, and how does it shape an individual’s willingness to vote for parties endorsing conspiracies? How may ethnopopulists appeal to religion and conspiracies to construct a memory regime? In this panel, each paper takes a different theoretical and methodological approach to address these questions.

First, Roman Hlatky asks how shared historical identities impact wartime attitudes. Questioning the relative strength of ethnic and political identities, he investigates whether and how pan-Slavic and Soviet identities affect attitudes towards the Russo-Ukrainian War. Fielding survey experiments in Russia and Ukraine, Hlatky examines how different types of identities shape views towards aggressors and targets of aggression. This study informs how historical frames can be activated to justify war domestically, how historical identities are made salient, and how historical and contemporary positionality in ongoing conflicts affect the strength of these frames.

Frances Cayton and Courtney Blackington analyze how political and religious leaders spread conspiracy theories online and offline. They leverage conspiracy theories emerging out of a plane crash in Russia that killed 96 top Polish officials, which parallels a 1940s Soviet massacre of Polish officials. They combine interviews with participants of marches promoting the conspiracy with a database of memorials for crash victims and 6,000 tweets discussing this crash. They find that, when engaging with the crash online, politicians invoke historical memory of the 1940s massacre, rather than spread conspiracies explicitly. However, offline, politicians are more likely to give speeches that explicitly endorse crash conspiracies. Further, while religious leaders do not engage in online conspiracy discourse, they regularly lead offline memorials that appeal to historical Soviet aggression. Their findings shed light on how political and religious leaders work together and adjust their frames to spread conspiracy theories.

Natalia Galica and Agnieszka Turska-Kawa ask which dimensions of religiosity most powerfully shape different conspiratorial beliefs. By disaggregating religiosity into three key dimensions of religious practices, beliefs, and experiences, they identify which aspects of religiosity make people more likely to believe in different forms of disinformation. By tapping into four different types of conspiracy theories (COVID, anti-vaccination, anti-5G, and anti-Ukrainian), their survey allows them to explore whether different aspects of religiosity increase people’s overall likelihood of believing in conspiracy theories, or whether the aspect of religiosity that matters differs based on the type of conspiracy theory. They conduct original online surveys with groups organized around specific conspiracy theories on Facebook—meeting the conspiracy believers in their actual online setting. This research thus helps expose the precise links between religiosity and conspiratorial beliefs.

Finally, Piotr Zagórski and Radek Markowski analyze how different aspects of religiosity shape the likelihood that individuals will vote for a radical right populist party. In the context of a country experiencing rapid secularization, they trace how Catholic Church officials cooperate with politicians to maintain influence over religious and moral issues in the public sphere. Using panel data from 1997 to 2019, they find that church attendance—but not personal religious beliefs—substantially increases the likelihood of voting for a populist radical right party. Their findings have implications for the disinformation literature because voters for this party have increasingly rallied around specific conspiracy theories as their party has endorsed these conspiracy theories.

Our methodologically diverse panel is also composed of a mix of graduate students, junior scholars, and senior scholars who work at different types of institutions across multiple countries.

Sub Unit

• Division 13: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Individual Presentations

• Historical Identity and Interstate Conflict: Evidence from Russia and Ukraine - Roman Hlatky, University of North Texas

• From the Pulpit to the Podium: Cueing Conspiracies to Construct Memory Regimes - Frances Cayton, Cornell University; Courtney Blackington, University of Pittsburgh

• Religiosity and Conspiracy Beliefs: The Study of Catholic Poland - Natalia Anna Galica, University of Silesia in Katowice; Agnieszka Turska-Kawa, University of Silesia in Katowice

• Religious Voting in Poland: Belonging versus Believing - Piotr Zagórski, SWPS University (Warsaw); Radoslaw Markowski

Chair

• George Soroka Harvard University

Discussant

• Tsveta Petrova Columbia University