Ideological Extremism or Far-Right Attitudes? The Role of Ideology for COVID-19 Scepticism

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 sceptics view the virus as harmless (i.e., not worse than a casual flu). While political orientation appears to play a crucial role in developing these sceptical positions, previous research showed inconsistent findings on the relationship between COVID-19 related beliefs and ideological orientation: Whereas various studies find close ties between far-right attitudes and COVID-19 related beliefs, other research suggests that sceptical views are linked to extremism on both ends of the ideological spectrum. We contribute to this debate by investigating the underlying ideological foundations of COVID-19 scepticism on a more fine-grained conceptualisation and measurement of ideological orientation and by focusing on a case with a prevalence of support for parties at both ideological fringes. Using data from a representative survey conducted in the East German region of Thuringia in autumn 2020, we show a strong significant link between far-right political attitudes and COVID-19 scepticism, as well as a weaker link between extremism on both sides of the ideological spectrum and scepticism.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• Covid-19 scepticism
• science scepticism
• far-right

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Explorative models including economic affectedness instead of economic risk perception showed similar findings (see table S.5 in the supplementary material).

2 We also tested a model based on an alternative operationalisation (five-point scale instead of a dummy variable) of threat to own health, threat to personal economic situation, and the two trust measurements. None of these alternative specifications changed our general conclusion that far-right attitudes, extremism, as well as trust in the government and public health authorities are central predictors of COVID-19 scepticism (see table S.4 in the supplementary material).

3 In a model containing two separate scales for the measurement of far-right attitudes (Neo-Nazi ideology and ethnocentrism), both dimensions are significant and are positively associated with COVID-19 skepticism (see table S.6 in the supplementary materials).

4 As a robustness check, we also computed a COVID-19 scepticism index consisting of three items. Next to the item mentioned beforehand the two additional items are ‘The danger posed by the coronavirus is greatly exaggerated by the media’ and ‘I trust my feelings about dealing with Corona more than so-called experts’ (see Rees et al., 2020). An OLS regression model using this additive index as dependent variable provided similar results to our full logistic regression model presented in the text. Likewise, a logistic regression model using a dummy variable computed of the three items where an individual was coded as COVID-19 sceptic ( = 1), when (s)he responded ‘fully agree’ or ‘mostly agree’ on all three items generated similar results. However, extremism (measured as either squared distance from the mean of the left-right self-placement scale or with dummy variables for a position on the left or right fringe of the distribution) was not significant in any of these models; see supplementary material tables S.1 and S.2.

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the Thuringian State Chancellery.

Notes on contributors

Anne Küppers

Anne Küppers is a research fellow at the Department of Political Science at the University of Jena. She holds a PhD from the University of Bonn. Her research focuses on climate denial, populist radical right parties, attitudes towards democracy and intra-party democracy. E-mail: [email protected]

Marion Reiser

Marion Reiser is professor of political science at the University of Jena (Germany), and holds a PhD (University of Goettingen) and a Habilitation (University of Frankfurt) in political science. Her research areas include political parties, representation and political attitudes. E-mail: [email protected]