Conspiracy mentality and the acceptance of political violence among young people in Germany

• In Event: A Kaleidoscope of Ideologically-motivated Extremism: Causes, Consequences & Solutions

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the construct "conspiracy mentality (CM)" and its role in predicting "acceptance of political violence". The paper consists of three parts. In the first part we argue, in line with other authors, that CM can be seen as a generalised political attitude, similar to, but distinct from, right-wing mentality (RWM). We show that CM has a stronger influence on intolerance towards dominant groups than RWM, while RWM has a stronger influence on intolerance towards low-status groups than CM. In the second part, we test the relationship between CM and the demographic characteristics of our sample by comparing prevalence across different groups. In the third part, we draw on some ideas from procedural justice theory to justify the expectation that conspiracy thinking is a mediator in the relationship between perceptions of fairness and legitimacy and the acceptance of political violence. The findings confirm our expectation. The analysis presented in this paper is based on a representative dataset for young people (16 to 21 years) in the German population (N = 3,590). The dataset was collected for the survey "Young People in Germany 2022", which is part of a research programme conducted by the "Monitoring and Transfer Platform Radicalisation (MOTRA)" consortium.

Authors

• Diego Farren, University of Hamburg & German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA)

• Janosch Kleinschnittger, Universität Hamburg

• Rebecca Endtricht, German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA)