Does a tendency toward conspiracism line up along our political spectrum? Not according to Adam Enders, Casey Klofstad, Shane Littrell, Joanne Miller, Yannis Theocharis, Joseph Uscinski, and Jan Zilinsky, who explore this question in a new paper, “Left–right political orientations are not systematically related to conspiracism,” published this month in the journal, Political Psychology.
The authors demonstrate that previous inconsistent findings on this question come from research designs, meaning they can’t be used to draw conclusions about how conspiracism relates to political identities.
They also examine specific studies that support “the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses,” meaning the idea that individuals who identify as right-wing are more likely to demonstrate conspiracism than their left-wing or centrist peers. (These are recent studies: two are from 2022, and one is from 2021.) But they conclude that these studies have “inappropriate measuring and modeling strategies.”
To test the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses themselves, the authors reexamine 18 US surveys and look at new surveys from 18 countries. They found “remarkable variability in the size, shape, and strength of the relationship between ideology and conspiracism — not only across countries, but over time within countries.”
They demonstrated the variability with correlation coefficients and turned to a methodology of multilevel meta-analysis to estimate the average correlation. “Even in the aggregate,” they found, “it seems that the most we can conclude about ideological asymmetries in conspiracism is that those on the right are slightly — albeit statistically significantly — more conspiratorial than those on the left, but that the size and direction of observed asymmetries vary considerably across countries and time.”
“No Single Functional Form”
These provided weak support for the hypotheses, and the authors think that “differences in the relationship between conspiracism and political identities across political and temporal contexts do not stem from sampling variability, but rather from systematic forces that impact ideology, conspiracism, or both.” And so they decide that there’s “no single functional form” to characterize the connection between conspiracism and political identity across countries, or for that matter within countries at different points of time.
The authors feel that their research inspires questions of how to conceptualize and measure political extremism, and whether left-right identity measures or a spectrum along such identitarian lines is even a useful framing here. And they think their work can inspire guidelines for others: “Simply put, scholars should not employ cross-sectional or short-term data to make conclusive, broadly generalizable arguments about the relationship between conspiracism and the psychology of liberals or conservatives.”
They conclude by insisting that their findings “should not excuse the behavior of conservative politicians and media personalities who have, in recent years, trafficked in conspiracy theories or incited conspiracy-driven violence.” They also draw a distinction between conspiracism in the masses and elites, and express hope that others will conduct more research on the latter in the future.
