Partisanship and plane crashes: can partisanship drive conspiratorial beliefs?

ABSTRACT

Do partisans process information about conspiracy theories like other standard types of political information – through a partisan lens? Are partisans of ethnopopulist parties more likely to believe in conspiracy theories in general, or only the ones their party endorses? Using data from Poland, I show that when their party elites endorse a specific conspiracy theory, partisans are more likely to believe in it. However, ethnopopulist partisanship is only positively associated with conspiratorial beliefs when an individual's ethnopopulist party pushes a conspiracy theory. Thus, conspiratorial beliefs appear to operate like other sources of political information, which are vulnerable to partisan cueing.

KEYWORDS:

• Conspiracy theories
• conspiratorial beliefs
• partisanship
• populism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Lenka Bustikova, Rahsaan Maxwell, Milada Vachudova, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For example, Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac (2013) argue that Americans who endorse free-market economics are more likely to reject climate science as well as facts such as HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer.

2 For example, Republicans are more likely to believe in Obama birther conspiracies when compared to Democrats (Pasek et al. 2015).

3 Importantly, in this paper, I do not analyze whether party cues encourage partisans to believe in conspiracy theories when parties are not ethnopopulist. I do not have data available to effectively address this question. As underscored in previous sections of this paper, the literature on partisanship and information processing shows that partisanship tends to shape the way we perceive political information, regardless of whether the party falls on the left, right, or center of the political spectrum. Drawing inferences from this literature, I would expect partisans of parties that are not ethnopopulist but that do endorse a conspiracy theory to have a higher likelihood of believing in that conspiracy theory. However, I lack a way to test this expectation and therefore do not pursue it further.

4 As noted above, I unfortunately cannot control for religiosity because the Voices of Central Europe survey data did not ask respondents about their religious activities or beliefs.

5 Since the Diagnoza Społeczna survey from 2011, 2013, and 2015 asked different questions than the Voices of Central Europe data from 2020, the variables included are slightly different. All variables included in the 2011, 2013, and 2015 CART analysis using Diagnoza Społeczna data were: (1) religiosity; (2) societal trust; (3) trust in political institutions; (4) education; (5) gender; (6) income; (7) whether one lived in a rural or urban area; (8) age; and (9) non-partisanship or partisanship with PiS, PO, PSL, or the United Left. All variables included in the 2020 model using Voices of Central data were: (1) degree of support for democracy; (2) feeling threatened by minorities; (3) feeling oppressed; (4) feeling that other groups were favored at the expense of one’s own group; (5) trust in political institutions; (6) education; (7) gender; (8) age; (9) whether one lived in a rural or urban area; (10) satisfaction with political institutions; and (11) partisanship in either Civic Coalition, PiS, Konfederacja, Left, or the Polish Coalition. Unfortunately, the Voices of Central Europe survey did not ask questions about respondents’ religious affiliations. Therefore, I cannot include this variable in the 2020 model.

6 For non-PiS partisans, PiS =0 and thus they follow the left-side of the tree.

7 For PiS partisans, PiS =1 and thus, partisans are on the right-side of the tree.