Conspiratorial thinking and foreign policy views: evidence from Central Europe

ABSTRACT

Foreign policy analysts assume that conspiratorial thinking is linked to citizens’ foreign policy views and in particular to a preference among citizens for an alignment with Russia rather than the West. Empirical studies on the relationship between conspiratorial thinking and citizens’ foreign policy views are, however, lacking, despite a growing general academic interest in its origins and consequences. Our analysis breaks new ground by empirically evaluating the relationship between conspiratorial thinking and foreign policy preferences based on ISSP survey data for Slovakia. We find that conspiratorial thinking decreases the extent to which citizens prefer their country to be aligned with the West. The effect of conspiratorial thinking is substantively meaningful and on par with other predictors of foreign policy views.

Acknowledgements

Authors contributed to the manuscript equally and their names are listed in alphabetical order. An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the Annual Work Conference of the Netherlands Institute of Government in November 2019. We are thankful to JEPOP's editor and three excellent reviewers for their valuable and helpful reviews which helped us to strengthen the manuscript. We are also thankful to Wolfgang Wagner and Jan-Willem van Prooijen who provided feedback on earlier versions of the paper. All mistakes remain our own. Michal Onderco thankfully acknowledges support from the Charles University Research Centre program UNCE/ HUM/028 (Peace Research Center Prague/Faculty of Social Sciences).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Uscinski and Parent (2014, 93–94) note about the US that Republicans with pronounced conspiratorial thinking show less support for the war in Iraq than Republicans with low conspiratorial thinking. In a similar vein, Democrats with pronounced conspiratorial thinking exhibit less support for the war in Afghanistan than their peers who score lower on conspiratorial thinking.

2 Closely related conceptualizations of conspiratorial thinking can be found in Uscinski and Olivella ( 2017, 2) who consider it a distinct worldview, in the work Uscinski and Parent (2014) as well as Douglas et al. (2019) who see it as an ideological orientation, in Enders’ (2019) work who defines it as a belief system, or in Oliver and Wood’s (2014, 954) study who consider it a general orientation towards politics.

3 Respondents were selected by using a multilevel stratified random sample, stratified by the Slovakia's administrative regions and urbanization level (Krivý et al. 2014).

4 Foreign policy attitudes might be also driven by individual hawkishness. We conducted a robustness check and found no evidence that it drives attitudes in our analysis. We present the results in the online appendix.

5 We also estimated an ordered logit model with three response categories (stand by West, balanced, stand by Russia). The results are substantively similar (see Appendix), but we show the results of a multinomial logit model because it does not rest on the assumption that the categories of the dependent are ordered in a particular way ex ante. Multinomial logit models rest on the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption, which is met in our case (see Appendix Tables A5-A7).

6 Results are displayed in terms of relative risk ratios. A one-unit increase in conspiratorial thinking increases the relative risk of a respondent to prefer Slovakia to take a balanced position rather than standing by the West by 1.29 (Table 1, left column of coefficients).

7 It shows a change from zero to one in the case of dummy variables.

8 In the online appendix, we demonstrate that the effect of conspiratorial thinking remains robust when controlling for individual party ideology as well.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michal Onderco

Michal Onderco is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interests include the role of public opinion and political parties in the creation of foreign policy in Central Europe.

Florian Stoeckel

Florian Stoeckel is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter (UK). His research focuses on public opinion towards European integration, conspiratorial thinking, tolerance, and identity politics. Currently, he is principal investigator of a project on distrust, conspiracies, and the political challenges of coping with Covid-19 funded by the British Academy.