Partisan Bias in COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories: News Reliance and the Moderating Role of Trust in Health Authorities

ABSTRACT

Neglecting the role of political bias in the public’s perceptions of health authorities could be deceptive when studying potentially politicized COVID-19 conspiracy theories (CCTs); however, previous studies often treated health authorities as a single entity and did not distinguish between different types of CCTs. Drawing from motivated reasoning theory, we investigate the politically motivated nature of CCTs by examining their associations with individuals’ media reliance, party identification, conspiratorial mentality, and importantly, trust in (politicized or independent) health authorities. In a national survey conducted in late 2020 (N = 2,239) in Turkey, a heavily polarized context, we found that not accounting for political identities shown in CCTs and health authorities could be misleading. While those with a strong conspiracy mentality were more likely to endorse all types of CCTs, party identification and trust in different types of health authorities led people to believe in certain CCTs aligning with their political attitudes. The influence of media reliance on CCTs depended on the level of trust in health authorities, again suggestive of the influence of political partialities.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at OSF https://osf.io/rq8s9/?view_only=91c3de74bb6e4b2e80c0064ff8f601d4

Notes

1. To note, while our measures of nonpartisan CCTs (e.g., drug companies produced COVID-19 virus) touch upon globally prevalent debates about lab leak vs. natural origin hypothesis (Thacker, 2021), the political conspiracies are more contentious and localized, with a larger room for politically motivated debates about their truthfulness (e.g., media exaggerates death statistics to weaken government’s hand; the government keeps the actual death toll secret from citizens).

2. Some countries managed to prevent the politicization of the pandemic, such as in Sweden where there has been more unity and less politicization during the COVID-19 pandemic (Christensen et al., 2022).

3. https://osf.io/rq8s9/?view_only=91c3de74bb6e4b2e80c0064ff8f601d4.

4. Survey 1 and 2 were not used due to key questions needed for our analysis missing or were part of experimental modules. (See Appendix A for additional analysis).

5. Results of data analysis that drops all missing values could be found in Appendix B.

6. We did an item-by-item analysis, treating each item as a dependent variable. The analytical results are similar to the one when these three items are constructed into a single index. There are some variations in the results about interaction effects, which requires future research to tackle with larger set of items (Appendix C).

7. Although item 4 and 5 are more contestable and their content draws widespread debate and speculation, they contain key characteristics of conspiratorial thinking. Their position toward the periphery of what constitutes a clear conspiracy belief help test political biases in this gray and more-contested and complicated space.

8. Although there were clashes between TMA and the current Turkish government regarding COVID-19 issue (Genç, 2020), which might concerns us with its political stance, TMA is still affiliated to the World Medical Association, and believed as an independent professional association (Turkish Medical Association, 2020). We also did additional analysis treating trust in TMA (trust in anti-government health authorities) as an independent variable (Appendix D).

9. The results did not change much when we recoded these respondents who indicated no response/do not know as being not supportive of the government (Appendix E).

10. Additional hierarchical linear regression was conducted to check model differences (Appendix F).

11. Indeed, when we tested each social media platform separately, we found that reliance on Twitter negatively predicted belief in all three types of CCTs. This might be because Twitter users in Turkey are mostly young and educated people.

12. the correlation between reliance on legacy media and social media is 0.46 (p < .001).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was conducted as a part of a larger research project supported by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) [Project number: 120K438].