Conspiracy Thinking and Electoral Trust During Tumultuous Times: The Case of Israel

Abstract

Abstract Recent research reveals the association between conspiracy thinking, i.e., one’s predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories, and trust in elections and election outcomes. This research, however, has thus far only examined single election cycles. In this letter, we examine whether citizens’ conspiracy thinking, across electoral winners and losers, predicts electoral mistrust in the polarized, crisis-laden state of Israel. We test our expectation using four nationally representative samples fielded in 2022—before the electoral campaign started, during the campaign, and after the November national election, when a change in government took place. We show that conspiracy thinking predicts electoral mistrust and that this effect is independent of the effect of being an electoral loser. We also demonstrate that losing or winning the election does not meaningfully moderate the effect of conspiracy thinking on electoral mistrust.