The political science literature of conspiracy theories remains decades old and robust. Beginning with Hofstadter (1964), researchers began to investigate the “paranoid style” of American politics while in the midst of the Cold War and McCarthyism. Although these early investigations helped to build a solid foundation of literature on conspiracism, the focus of this review remains to highlight and synthesize the most recent literature, which will in turn help to address the complex question of this paper.
Recent surveys indicate that half of the American population endorses at least one conspiracy theory (Oliver & Wood, 2014). For instance, as of 2015, 36% of American respondents believed that the United States government had either assisted …show more content…
The first is the emergence of conspiracism as a political attitude in general in the United States, detached from any political ideology (Oliver & Wood, 2014; Imhoff & Bruder, 2014). The second theme remains the dissemination of conspiracy theories across geopolitical space and how the endorsement of conspiracism may undermine democratic values and public health concerns (Iqtidar, 2016; Ortmann & Heathershaw, 2012; Yablokov, 2015). Regarding the former, a large and robust interdisciplinary literature in both psychology and political science has, for instance, established Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) as distinct political ideologies (Kugler, Jost, & Noorbaloochi, 2014; Shaffer & Duckitt, 2013). As noted, an emerging theme in the recent literature tends to suggest that conspiratorial thinking remains its own distinct political belief independent from SDO and RWA (Dagnall, Drinkwater, Parker, Denovan & Parton, 2015). The latter theme, conspiracy theories across geopolitical space, remains a thread in the literature that highlights the global regional variants of conspiracism. Each theme addresses the deeper threads of conspiracism within a political science framework, while demonstrating that conspiracism may undermine pro-social, democratic