Left–right political orientations are not systematically related to conspiracism

Abstract

AbstractResearchers have long sought to make generalizable conclusions about the relationship between conspiracism and political identities. However, this literature remains deeply conflicted. The “extremity hypothesis” argues that, due to the psychology of extremism, individuals who identify as extremely left or right wing should display higher levels of conspiracism than centrists. But the “asymmetry hypothesis” argues that, due to the psychology of conservatism, individuals who self‐identify as right wing should display higher levels of conspiracism than those identifying as centrists or left wing. Here, we attempt to reconcile these competing hypotheses and the empirical findings supporting them. First, we demonstrate that the inconsistent findings stem from research designs that cannot support generalizable conclusions about the relationship between conspiracism and political identities. Second, we reexamine the most prominent studies supporting the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses. We find that they suffer from inappropriate measurement and modeling strategies, rendering their conclusions suspect. We then test the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses by reexamining 18 U.S. surveys (2012–21; n = 32,056) and examining new surveys from 18 countries (2022; n = 18,033). In total, our 77 samples spanning a decade and 27 countries (n = 161,492) provide only weak support for either hypothesis. The wide variability in our findings suggests that differences in the relationship between conspiracism and political identities across political and temporal contexts do not stem from sampling variability, but rather from systematic forces that impact ideology, conspiracism, or both. We conclude that there is no single functional form that universally characterizes the relationship between conspiracism and political orientations across countries, or even over time within countries.