While research on conspiracy theories and those who believe them has recently undergone an empirical renaissance, there still exists a great deal of uncertainty about the measurement of conspiratorial beliefs and predispositions, and the consequences of a conspiratorial mindset when it comes to expressly political attitudes and behaviors. Unfortunately, current strategies for measuring the latent trait that informs conspiratorial beliefs are affected by error attributable to partisan motivated reasoning, social desirability concerns, and the peculiar content and context of specific conspiracy theories. In this project, I first demonstrate, using data from the 2012 American National Election Study, that beliefs in a variety of specific conspiracy theories are simultaneously the product of both a general predisposition toward conspiratorial thinking and partisanship. I further find, using survey data gathered via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, that the level of partisan content ingrained within conspiracy theories varies tremendously across conspiracy theories, including even inherently “political” conspiracies.Next, I use unique data gathered via a module on the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and reigning theory on the characteristics of conspiratorial thinking to construct and validate a cumulative, unidimensional scale of conspiratorial thinking. I find that a substantial proportion of the population is highly suspicious of governmental authority. In addition to being related to other constructs and attitudes such as authoritarianism, trust, and perceptions of governmental corruption, the conspiratorial thinking scale strongly predicts conspiratorial attitudes about genetically-modified foods, the link between childhood vaccines and autism, the birthplace of Barack Obama, governmental knowledge about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.Finally, I demonstrate the effects of conspiratorial thinking on a variety of political phenomena of normative interest to political scientists. First, I consider the moderating role of a conspiratorial mindset when it comes to traditional relationships like the one between partisanship and attitudes about the role of government. More specifically, I demonstrate that as one’s level of conspiratorial thinking increases, the ties between partisanship and feelings about the federal government, attitudes about the scope and reach of government, preferences about the level of governmental spending and production of services, and sup- port for the Tea Party simultaneously dissolve. Second, I find that conspiratorial thinking is negatively related to approval of major governmental institutions, including the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Lastly, I corroborate recent work showing the negative relationship between conspiratorial thinking and participation in campaign activities, and extend this work by demonstrating the negative effect of conspiratorial thinking on the probability of identifying as a partisan and the positive relationship between conspiratorial thinking and Tea Party support.
Read
