Partisanship and plane crashes: can partisanship drive conspiratorial beliefs?

Abstract

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.