Will the Real Conspiracy Please Stand Up: Sources of Post-Communist Democratic Failure

Abstract

At the start of the pandemic, it looked like the biggest COVID-related threat to democracy, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, was executive aggrandizement. This focus, however, may lead us to overlook a bigger threat to Eastern European democracy. We argue that Eastern European democracies’ original sin of state capture has been exacerbated by the rise of conspiracy theories, whose stock has only increased with the addition of COVID misinformation. Eastern European voters struggle to differentiate between the true political conspiracy that enables private interests to control the state and conspiracies without empirical basis, such as COVID denialism, world government, or political correctness as a tyrannical plot. As a result, conspiracy theories enable the state capture camp to divide the reformist opposition and maintain their grip, while simultaneously claiming that they are governing competently and in line with European values. We use an original survey from Bulgaria and a GLOBSEC 2020 cross-national survey to explore this hypothesis. Finally, we draw some theoretical implications from the empirical evidence for assessing the nature of democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe. We call for more research on the conspiracy cleavage as a factor in explaining backsliding processes.

Illiberal Communication and Election Intervention during the Refugee Crisis in Germany

“…The reason we focus more on the conspiratorial aspect of stories than any other specific negative theme in the coverage is because the conspiratorial angle may be an important and somewhat overlooked aspect of political competition. In Eastern Europe, it may allow governing parties to effectively hide state capture by appealing to voters with authoritarian tendencies, while shifting criticism to (allegedly) refugee-cuddling reformist oppositions (Marinov and Popova 2021). 17 These types of voters may be especially likely to turn against the mainstream.…”

The Partisan Utility of Racial Demographic Change and Democratic Backsliding in the American Public

“…On a broader level, the phenomenon of racial threat from demographic change has contributed to the emergence of far-right politics throughout many Western democracies (Bonikowski 2017;Hanley and Vachudova 2018;Eatwell and Goodwin 2018;Vachudova 2020;Lührmann and Lindberg 2019;Marinov and Popova 2021). Only recently has it gained prominence as a potential cause in far-right political activity in the U.S.…”

Conspiracy Theory Beliefs and Political Trust: The Moderating Role of Political Communication

“…In the words of Castanho Silva et al (2017, p. 425): "To make a musical analogy, one could maintain that if populism is the theme, then many conspiracy theories are variations on the theme." Importantly, prior research has only recently started looking into the effect of political contexts-such as the communication of conspiracy theories by governing actors-when analyzing the impact of belief in conspiracy theories on citizens' political attitudes (Adam-Troian et al, 2021;Imhoff et al, 2022;Marinov & Popova, 2022).…”