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Trust Nobody: How Voters React to Conspiracy Theories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2022

Giovanna M. Invernizzi Open the ORCID record for Giovanna M. Invernizzi [Opens in a new window]  and
Ahmed Ezzeldin Mohamed Open the ORCID record for Ahmed Ezzeldin Mohamed [Opens in a new window]
Giovanna M. Invernizzi*
Affiliation:
Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin, Italy
Ahmed Ezzeldin Mohamed
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

How does exposure to conspiracy theories affects voters’ political attitudes? Using an online experiment among US subjects, we show that exposure to conspiracy theories decreases voters’ trust in the domestic informational environment. Subjects were exposed to conspiracy theories that are entirely unrelated to American domestic politics, which further underscores such narratives’ danger. However, we fail to reject the null hypothesis that voters do not weigh unrelated conspiracies in their evaluation of politicians’ performance and domestic political institutions. Overall, our findings illustrate that an informational environment permeated by conspiracy theories could impede the functioning of democracy by eroding trust in information providers and undermining the credibility of political information.

Keywords

Accountabilityconspiracy theoriestrust
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Summer 2023 , pp. 201 - 208
Open Practices
Open data Open materials
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

This article has earned badges for transparent research practices: Open Data and Open Materials. For details see the Data Availability Statement.

References

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Supplementary material: Link

Invernizzi and Mohamed Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OSEXBV
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Invernizzi and Mohamed supplementary material

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