Does communist nostalgia lead to COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs?

ABSTRACT

Why are people in Central and Eastern Europe more hesitant towards COVID-19 vaccination and more prone to believe in COVID-19 related conspiracy theories than other Europeans? The article claims that the spread of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs in the post-communist region might be fostered by communist nostalgia. Drawing on the survey data from Lithuania, I show that communist nostalgia is one of the best predictors of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, controlling for other related factors such as populist attitudes, trust in political institutions, confidence in media and scientists and pro-Western attitudes. The paper claims that communist nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe is conducive to conspiracy beliefs in a similar vein as nostalgic narratives employed by populist radical right in Western countries.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• conspiracy theories
• communist nostalgia
• populism
• Central and Eastern Europe

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The data is available via the Lithuanian Data Archive for Social Sciences and Humanities (LiDA), see Ramonaitė et al., 2022.

2 National lockdown in Lithuania was introduced on 7 November 2020, as a wave of new infections started to grow rapidly since the end of October 2020. The wave reached the peak by the end of December 2020, with around 3,000 new cases per day in a country of population with 2 795,7 thousand inhabitants. By the end of January 2021, the average number of new cases dropped down to about 800 per day. The lockdown was cancelled on 1 July 2021 (LRV 2021).

3 As the first item (‘Coronavirus was probably created in a laboratory’) might be criticised for being too vague, a four-item index was also created excluding this item and used for analysis as a robustness check.

4 An alternative measure capturing the evaluation of the communist regime in relation to the present can be found in the Baltic Barometer 2014. It asks respondents of the survey in the three Baltic states to identify the time period when their country was best off – the interwar era, the Soviet era, the years between the restoration of independence and EU membership in 2004; or the current time period from 2004 (see Duvold et al. 2020).

5 See Table A5 in the Appendix for the results of the analysis with the four-item the index of disbelief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories (excluding an item ‘Coronavirus was probably created in a laboratory’).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Lietuvos Mokslo Taryba: [Grant Number S-LIP-19-67].

Notes on contributors

Ainė Ramonaitė

Ainė Ramonaitė is Professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University. She is the principal investigator of the Lithuanian National Election Study. Her research focuses on political attitudes and electoral behavior in post-communist countries.