Conspiracy beliefs and populist radical right attitudes: A comparative European analysis

Introduction

Europe is facing the serious political challenge of post-truth politics, where dis- and misinformation are widespread (Conrad et al., 2023). One way this manifests is through beliefs in conspiracy theories, that is, explanations of events that involve the malevolent machinations of powerful people that act in secret for their own benefit (Goertzel, 1994). In the charged, polarised environment that Europe finds itself in, conspiracies have been propagated at the highest levels of government without credible evidence to underpin them, and even moderate politicians are not immune to their charms (Önnerfors and Krouwel, 2021). The potential dangers to the functioning of democracy include conspiracy theories being drawn upon to mobilise people into violent action (Farinelli, 2021), erode public trust in institutions (Van Prooijen et al., 2022b) and promote hate speech or spread dangerous misinformation that undermines governmental efforts in social, political or health crises (Douglas et al., 2015).

Simultaneously, Europe has witnessed a rise of populist radical right parties. While some scholars had previously put forward arguments for why certain European countries seemed immune to their appeals, populist radical right parties have now become part of the political scene across the continent, even in apparently ‘least likely’ cases (Valentim, 2024: 1–3). These parties propose an illiberal conception of government based on a narrow and exclusionary definition of ‘the people’ whom they claim to represent and, according to Mudde (2007), are defined by three main characteristics: populism which is characterised by anti-establishment sentiment (herein referred by us as anti-elitism), authoritarianism and nativism. These characteristics are echoed in anti-pluralist and illiberal attitudes, termed populist radical right attitudes, that are often – though not exclusively – seen among their voters, such as opposing minority rights, rejecting supranational institutions (such as the EU), supporting more majoritarian forms of democracy, rejecting immigration and supporting authoritarian leaders.

Over recent years there has been extensive research on the relationship between populism – both of the radical right and radical left – and conspiracy theories which points to a bidirectional relationship between support for the two. Both populism and conspiracy theories present a highly Manichean conception of the world, one which divides it into a moral battle between good and evil (Castanho Silva et al., 2017). Previous research (Pirro and Taggart, 2023) has focused on how populist leaders use conspiracy theories while in government to demonise and delegitimise opponents, stoke a prolonged sense of crisis and distract the public from potential governing failures. Others argue that a conspiracy mentality helps predict support for populist leaders (Balta et al., 2022), who define themselves as political outsiders.

However, few studies have analysed the relationship between populist radical right attitudes and conspiracy beliefs among publics at the cross-national level. The release of the high-quality Round 10 (2020–2022) data of the European Social Survey (ESS) makes this possible, which included a specific sub-module on conspiracy thinking (see Hanson et al., 2021 for details). We use this to examine the relationship between a number of attitudes associated with the populist radical right and three different levels of conspiracy beliefs in 28 European countries: Covid-19, science conspiracy belief and general conspiracy thinking. We hypothesise that anti-elitist, nativist and authoritarian attitudes – key features of populist radical right attitudes in Europe – will be associated with these conspiracy theory beliefs. The findings show that four populist radical right attitudes consistently predict belief in all three conspiracy theories across the European continent: Believing that citizens should have the final say in referendums, that decisions should be made nationally rather than at the EU level, that it is not important for minority rights to be protected and that it is acceptable to have a strong leader above the law.

Importantly, we not only carry out European-wide analyses, but furthermore ask whether differences between populist radical right attitudes in the East and West of the continent translate into differences in their associations with conspiracy beliefs. Such analyses are warranted by the specific contexts in Central and Eastern Europe that may be conducive to conspiratorial thinking, not least post-Communist legacies (Ramonaitė, 2023). This reveals that anti-immigration attitudes matter more for predicting Covid-19 conspiracy belief in Western Europe, whereas believing that decisions should be taken nationally rather than by the European Union matters more for explaining general conspiracy mentality and scientific conspiracy belief in Central and Eastern Europe.

Finally, we test whether three contextual-level variables (corruption, GDP PPP per capita and Covid-19 mortality rates) help explain associations with conspiracy theory beliefs across the continent, with higher levels of corruption being the only significant factor of these.

Our study provides two general contributions to the literature of populist radical right attitudes and conspiracy theories. On the one hand, it offers a cross-national overview of the relationship between attitudes associated with the populist radical right – those pertaining to nativism, authoritarianism and anti-elitism – and three different levels of conspiracy theory belief. On the other, it sheds light on the similarity and variations in the patterns of these relationships between Western and Eastern European countries, regions which have a number of key cultural, economic, political and historical differences.

Conspiracy theories

First, let us lay out key observed patterns of those who believe in conspiracy theories. From an individual standpoint, conspiracy theories correlate with a number of psychological biases, such as motivated reasoning – the motivation to arrive at desired conclusions when processing information (Kunda, 1990); personality traits including the dark triad of individual narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy (Cichocka et al., 2016; Hughes and Machan, 2021; March and Springer, 2019), and anomie, anxiety and powerlessness (Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999); as well as low general or interpersonal trust (Wood and Douglas, 2013). They have also been shown to correlate with right-wing authoritarianism (Adorno et al., 1950; Bruder et al., 2013), political cynicism (Swami et al., 2011) and social dominance – a tendency to support hierarchical social structures that reflect inequality (Sidanius and Pratto, 2001). Research also points towards the correlation between a willingness to conspire and beliefs in conspiracy theories (Douglas and Sutton, 2011). In this direction, studies shed light on the relationship between people’s belief in conspiracy theories and their willingness to commit everyday crimes (Jolley et al., 2019) or display non-normative political engagement (Imhoff et al., 2021).

Socially, conspiracy theories have a strong appeal with groups who feel disadvantaged or have low self-esteem (Van Prooijen and Douglas, 2018). Their Manichaean outlook and moralising purview may provide socially disempowered, marginalised and anxious groups with explanations that offer paths for a stronger social identity (Sternisko et al., 2020). They also correlate with collective narcissism, the belief that one’s in-group is exceptional and that it is not properly recognised by an out-group(s) (Golec De Zavala and Federico, 2018). Conspiracy theories provide collective narcissists with narratives that reinforce their sense of uniqueness or exceptionality while providing them with culprits for their situation. Therefore, conspiracy theories become outlets for collective narcissists’ intergroup hostility and sense of entitlement (De Zavala et al., 2009). Collective narcissism has been identified with nationalist, ethnic, ideologically extreme or religious groups (De Zavala et al., 2009). Another strong predictor of conspiracy theory belief is system identity threat (Federico et al., 2018), or the perception that people’s in-group’s fundamental values are under attack by societal change (Van Prooijen and Jostmann, 2013). Furthermore, from the supply side, conspiracy entrepreneurs exploit the possibilities that conspiracy theories afford them for social, political or economic purposes (Hyzen and Van Den Bulck, 2021), something that might help move these theories from the margins to the mainstream.

With few exceptions, the comparative literature on conspiracy beliefs has, however, tended to focus on conspiracies in the United States and other Western countries, and less so on Central and Eastern Europe (Astapova et al., 2021: 2). Where cross-European analyses are carried out, current studies have analysed the relationship between belief in conspiracy theories and various other attitudes using these data where all countries are pooled together (Backhaus et al., 2023; Jabkowski et al., 2023; Syropoulos and Gkinopoulos, 2023). As Astapova et al. (2021: 3) remarked, ‘in spite of its major significance in both the history of some of the best-known conspiracy theories and their contemporary circulation, rarely has (the region) made it into the mainstream of conspiracy theory research’, with Šteger (2024: 80) furthermore noting that conspiracy research in the region ‘is largely scattered and fragmented’. Thus, we feel it is important to assess whether any associations between conspiracy beliefs in Central and Eastern Europe differ from those found in Western Europe.

Populist radical right attitudes

Since the beginning of the century, populist parties have experienced increased success in Europe, especially on the right (Greven, 2016; Mudde, 2004). Populism is ‘a thin centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics should be the expression of the general will of the people’ (Mudde, 2004: 541). Given its ideological ambiguity, some (De Vreese et al., 2018) have purported populism as an expression of political communication content and political communication style, emphasising the always present people-centric and anti-elitist content of populism and the use of a direct style of language devised to highlight and strengthen a particular social identity by confronting it with an out-group(s). Thus, both radical left and radical right populists share a general distrust of the economic, political and scientific establishment, which may translate into attitudes such as EU distrust – for economic concerns on the left and sovereignty ones on the right – or an appetite for majoritarian forms of democracy (Meijers, 2017; Mohrenberg et al., 2021).

Although these characteristics span across left and right-wing populist parties, this article takes an interest in the attitudes that are shared by the populist radical right. Expressions of radical-right preferences by publics have grown in Western democracies in tandem with the electoral success of populist radical right parties (Valentim, 2024: 3). Much like conspiracy theories, the populist radical right offers a deeply Manichean outlook of society, consisting of a moralising (Müller, 2017), idealised and narrow definition of what constitutes the people (Staerklé and Green, 2018). This represents one of its definitional core elements: nativism. The nativist component of the populist radical right (Noury and Roland, 2020) combines with its second core element, its rejection of the establishment, to thread a nationalistic and xenophobic discourse that not only targets elites as the enemy of the people, but also scapegoats ethnic minorities and the arrival of immigrants. This has been argued to be a departure from the emancipatory element of ‘the people’ that characterises other forms of populism, where the struggle shifts away from ‘working class’ issues towards purely racial ones (Mondon, 2017). Thus, the racist component of the populist radical right is opposed to both globalisation and multiculturalism, as they constitute a threat to the racial and native composition of the ‘true’ people, as well as its narrow conception of popular sovereignty. The third component of the populist radical right is authoritarianism, a conception of society that is concerned with order and deference to authority (Donovan, 2019). This is an important departure from the populist radical left, as this populist radical right attitude emphasises the authority that emanates from the ‘true people’ to its leadership (Müller, 2016). Although the populist radical right can present itself as the defender of civil liberties when in opposition (Maggini, 2022), once it achieves power may advocate for obedience and respect for its leadership (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). Thus, this type of populism has given rise to a number of authoritarian leaders who claim to understand and embody this will, and who defend the use of coercion to counter social difference (Morelock and Narita, 2018).

It is thus not surprising that the populist radical right has been argued to constitute a threat for democratic governance, given its rejection of pluralism and liberalism. According to Zürn (2023), it is anti-pluralist in its narrow and exclusionary conception of ‘the people’, a construction of a social identity based on a nativist drive to monopolise popular sovereignty. This is different from the populist left’s construction of the ‘people’, which is more inclusive in its articulation of an opposition to the ‘elites’ (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013). Therefore, the populist radical right nativist nature explains its anti-pluralist rejection of immigration, as well as its firm opposition to minority rights, as they constitute both a recognition to an alternative and unauthentic out-group and a restriction to the full implementation of their interests (Mudde, 2004). Its illiberal nature meanwhile explains its rejection of transnational institutions that displace decision-making and sovereignty to foreign bodies, such as the European Union. Another populist radical right attitude is annoyance with liberal democratic checks and balances that deprive ‘the silent majority’ of a more stable and unlimited access to power. Thus, their illiberal component focuses on support for more majoritarian forms of democracy (Urbinati, 2019) that circumnavigate corrupt politicians and streamline the will of ‘the people’, something that also stems from the populist rejection of non-majoritarian institutions such as central banks, constitutional courts or international organisations (Zürn, 2023). Finally, in its most blatantly illiberal aspect, the populist radical right can delve into authoritarianism, through highlighting attitudes such as support for obedience and respect (Tillman, 2016) or support for leaders who feel above the law or seek to erode liberal democratic government (Minkenberg, 2000).

The populist radical right has also been presented as corresponding to the ‘TAN’ component of the GAL-TAN scale – that is ‘Green, Alternative, Libertarianism’ (GAL) to ‘Traditionalism, Authoritarianism and Nationalism’ – with populist radical right parties sometimes classified under the umbrella of TAN parties (Crulli, 2024; Dassonneville et al., 2024). While the authoritarian and nationalism components have already been captured in our discussion so far, the traditionalism component often covers a backlash to gender equality and same-sex or broader LGBTQ rights which are perceived as an affront to the traditional nuclear family (Dietze and Roth, 2020; Donà, 2021; Graff and Korolczuk, 2021; Kováts, 2018; Valentim, 2024: 4). These however may be less central to the populist radical right, and the extent to which populist radical right parties are focused on this differs from country to country (Backlund and Jungar, 2019; Lancaster, 2020; Linders et al., 2025; Spierings and Zaslove, 2015). Being at the opposite end to ‘GAL’, the populist radical right is also said to be sceptical of the need for action on climate change, viewing it as an issue of the cosmopolitan elite that is antagonistic to the needs of the people (Lockwood, 2018), with evidence that this is increasingly being incorporated into the ideology (Caldwell et al., 2025; Kenny and Fisher, 2025).

There are historical, economic, cultural and political differences between Central and Eastern and Western Europe which the literature of the populist radical right shows translate into attitudinal nuances. According to Bustikova (2014), Central and Eastern European radical right parties differ from their Western counterparts in the nature of their minority rights opposition, which is not so engrained in anti-immigration attitudes but in firm opposition to liberal accommodation of minority rights protections. In later work Bustikova (2018) argued that after the Syrian refugee crisis, Central and Eastern European radical right parties started to include anti-immigration stances into their minority rights attitudes, but that three main differences remained with their Western European analogues: left-leaning position in the economy, linkages between identity and political opening – the rejection of the opportunities that democratisation brought to minorities – and their coexistence with radicalised mainstream parties. In this sense, Pirro (2014: 599) argued that these differences stem from ‘historical legacies and idiosyncrasies of the post-communist context’ (2013: 599), so that important pre-communist, communist and post-communist attitudes surface. These differences address attitudes associated with a pulsion to restore a pre-communist national splendour, so that irredentism and clericalism surface as two important populist radical right attitudes in the East. Populist radical right parties in Central and Eastern European countries’ combination of left-wing economic stances and traditionalist cultural ones has also been argued to affect their positioning on European integration (Marks et al., 2006; Vachudova and Hooghe, 2009). Based on these considerations, we provide an additional comparative analysis of the relationship between populist radical right attitudes and the three levels conspiracy theory belief in both continental blocks.

The populist radical right and conspiracy theories

There has been increasing research on the relationship between populism and conspiracy theories (Mumma and Miller, 2025: 256/257). Bergmann (2022) argued that populist leaders have benefitted from exploiting the idea that their political systems and the people who run them are untrustworthy, shady and murky in a world where secretive and malevolent plots are possible. In this sense, populist politicians exploit conspiracy theories to fuel support for populist ideology (Hameleers, 2021). The anti-elitist nature of populism shapes its close relationship to conspiracist narratives that claim that evil elites are acting in secret for their own benefit. Therefore, van Prooijen (2018) argues that populism is a key political mentality underlying conspiracy theories. Furthermore, Pantazi et al. (2022) argued that conspiracy theory belief correlates with support for direct democracy, something related to the populist appetite for majoritarian forms of democracy that better voice the concerns of the ‘silent majority’ (Mohrenberg et al., 2021). Once in power, populist leaders draw upon conspiracy theories to help shield themselves from accountability by laying blame on secretive and conspiring elites, while also spreading conspiracy theories as a tool for mobilisation (Taggart, 2000). Some authors have gone as far as to state that there can be no populism without conspiracy theories (Stoica, 2017). Populist gullibility – or ‘an increased tendency for people high in populist attitudes to believe unsubstantiated or obscure epistemic claims as true’ (Van Prooijen et al., 2022a: 1075) – has also been argued to predict belief in conspiracy theories, as well as bullshit receptivity and supernatural beliefs. However, although conspiracy theory belief is quite pervasive among populists, this does not imply that all populists express belief in them (Bergmann, 2018). In this line, Bergmann and Butter (2020) argue that populist movements have the ability to attract both people who believe in conspiracy theories and people who do not.

Although both sides of the populist ideological extremes have been argued to be likely to express belief in conspiracy theories (Krouwel et al., 2017; Van Prooijen et al., 2015), some studies have identified conspiracy theories as a defining feature of the populist radical right. Its nativist component may help explain why conspiracy theories target ethnic minorities or immigrants during times of crisis (Sawyer, 2022). Their anti-elitist nature also explains narratives that lay the blame on evil elites who benefit from these crises, including scientists (Giorgi and Eslen-Ziya, 2022). Moreover, studies (Richey, 2017) point out the relationship between support for authoritarianism and conspiracy theory belief, as well as the exploitation of conspiracies by authoritarian leaders (Ren et al., 2022). Thus, conspiracy theories help the populist radical right exploit threatening situations by targeting out-groups and questioning official or institutional narratives. This was seen during the Covid-19 pandemic (Schwörer and Fernández-García, 2022), where these parties adapted their nativist discourse to blame immigrants during the first stages of the virus and then applied their anti-elitist component to attack governments (when in opposition) for their response to the virus as antidemocratic.

A particularly valuable recent study of the relationship between conspiracy theories and populist attitudes is that of Stockemer and Bordeleau (2025). Using an index of populist attitudes, they find that populist attitudes are the only consistent predictors of the majority of conspiracy theories across eight very different countries, while there are important country specific differences in terms of – among other factors – political interest, education level or religiosity. We take this further by asking whether there is a particular component of populism – and in particular of the populist radical right-wing variant – within Europe that is particularly associated with conspiracy beliefs rather than using a generalised populism index. Other studies have pointed to the fruitfulness of disaggregating populist attitudes for such purposes, but come with limitations in terms of geographic scope or representativeness. Christner (2022) for instance found that the anti-elitism and sovereignty aspects of populism correlate the most with conspiracist facets that involve government participation in Germany, but this was based on a small, convenience sample of 243 respondents. Another study (Castanho Silva et al., 2017) found that the anti-elitism component of populist attitudes is also more strongly related to a conspiratorial mentality than other components based on convenience samples collected via Amazon MTurk in the United States.

Moreover, few have looked at the relationship between attitudes that are specific to the populist radical right and conspiracy theory belief cross-nationally. We thus believe it is worth examining whether such attitudes help predict conspiracy beliefs across the continent, and if so which components have the highest predictive power. Given that anti-elitist attitudes are shared across the populist ideological board, our first hypothesis proposes that:

Our next two hypotheses delve into attitudes that are at the core of the populist radical right: nativism and authoritarianism. We expect respondents who display exclusionary attitudes to be more likely to believe in the conspiracy theories here analysed. The populist radical right rejects minority rights as obstacles to the implementation of the will of the ‘true people’. Both the populist radical right and conspiracies provide disenfranchised groups with a Manichean narrative that reinforces their social identity while it blames an out-group. Therefore, populist radical right members who oppose minority rights and have strong anti-immigration attitudes might be more likely to express belief in conspiracy theories. We also expect populist radical right authoritarianism to correlate with the three levels of conspiracy theories, given that authoritarian attitudes (Richey, 2017) and right wing authoritarianism (Bruder et al., 2013) have been shown to predict conspiracy theory belief. Thus, our two next hypotheses state:

While these are our three core components of populist radical right attitudes, as previously noted traditionalist and anti-Green policies have formed prominent – though less central – parts of radical right party platforms, as captured in the division by some scholars into the labelling of the so-called GAL-TAN second dimension. While recent empirical work questions the coherence of such GAL-TAN attitudes among publics (Kenny and Langsæther, 2023; Kurella and Rapp, 2025), for completeness we investigate whether traditionalist and anti-Green attitudes that may be associated with populist radical right attitudes are associated with conspiracy beliefs:

Based on the previously mentioned particularities that exist between Western and Central and Eastern Europe, we additionally test whether these differences are more strongly associated with the three levels of conspiracy belief in these blocks.

Data

We use data from Round 10 of the nationally-representative ESS (European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure, 2023a, 2023b), collected from 2020-2022. ¹ In total, we have 28 countries – 17 Western European countries and 11 post-communist countries, ² hereafter sometimes referred as Central and Eastern European ³ countries (see Figure 1). ⁴ Three additional countries in the dataset are excluded – Montenegro and France due to the absence of the conspiracy questions in their datasets, and Israel due to the focus on European countries. Poststratification weights and European population weights are used in all analyses. Unless otherwise specified, in all scale variables those who refused to answer or responded ‘don’t know’ are treated as missing.

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Figure 1.

(Strongly) agree with conspiracy belief statements across Europe.

Results

Descriptive analyses

First, we present descriptive statistics in Figure 1, examining the prevalence of belief for each of our three conspiracy measures (see Table A1 in the Appendix for the exact breakdown). Individuals who (strongly) agreed with each conspiracy statement are presented as a percentage of all respondents in that particular country.

Prominent regional differences exist. The countries with consistently lower conspiracy beliefs are all in Western Europe. For all three conspiracy measures, Sweden sees less than 10% of respondents in agreement. Agreement for each conspiracy is also low in Germany, Finland and Norway (15% or less), and Austria and Switzerland (less than 20%). However, there is heterogeneity in Western Europe, where some countries – Italy, Spain, Ireland and the United Kingdom – see over 20% agreement in the Covid-19 and general conspiracy belief, and Portugal reaches 40% agreement in general conspiracy beliefs. In Central and Eastern Europe meanwhile, there is no country where agreement with any conspiracy is below 20%. Bulgaria and North Macedonia consistently display the highest conspiracy beliefs across all questions (between 42%–54% agreement).

In some countries, there is variance in the level of agreement with different conspiratorial statements. In Belgium for instance, while just 17% agree with the Covid-19 conspiracy, 26% believe in the science conspiracy and 30% with the general conspiracy. This pattern of belief increasing from Covid-19 to science through to general conspiracy beliefs also holds in Cyprus, Iceland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovenia. In the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria and North Macedonia, the lowest level of belief is for science conspiracy theories. In other countries, levels of Covid-19 and science conspiratorial beliefs are similar, yet general conspiracy mentality is higher – these include Greece, Ireland, Croatia, Latvia, Poland and Serbia. Thus, patterns in agreement with these conspiratorial statements differ across different countries in different ways.

Next, do people who believe in one conspiracy statement tend to also believe in other ones in each country? To answer this, Figure 2 presents the Pearson’s R correlation between each bivariate pair of conspiracies in each country.

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Figure 2.

Correlations between different conspiracy belief statements across Europe.

In general, Covid-19 and general conspiracy beliefs are the least correlated, with scientist and general conspiracy beliefs the most correlated. There are some countries however where pairs of correlations are similar. In general, the bivariate pairs of conspiracy questions are more correlated with each other in former communist countries than they are in Western Europe. There are just two countries where bivariate correlations are higher than the 0.70 threshold – that between scientist and general conspiracy beliefs in both Slovakia and Czechia.

Thus, while responses are low to moderately correlated in the case of Covid-19/general conspiracy mentality or more strongly correlated in the case of scientist and general conspiracy mentality, the variation between them is not so strong as to suggest they are interchangeable. Thus, one would expect to see differences in the predictors of some of these conspiracy questions in comparison to others, so that, from here-on-in, the article will focus on what predicts beliefs in each of these individually rather than drawing them together into a summary index.

Regression analyses

To this end, we first carried out mixed-effects multilevel linear models with individuals nested within their respective countries. We regressed each of the conspiracy variables on our groups of independent variables as described in the data and methods section. ⁵ Figure 3 ⁶ visually presents the results of these through a coefficient plot (see Appendix Figure A1/Table A3 for demographic control coefficients, which – while included in the model in Figure 3 – are not displayed in this figure for presentation reasons)

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Figure 3.

Mixed effect multi-level models of conspiracy beliefs – Full model (95% CI).

From the populist belief questions, four are consistent predictors of all three conspiracies across the continent while controlling for other variables in the model: Believing that citizens should have the final say in referendums, that decisions should be made nationally rather than at the EU level, that it is not important for minority rights to be protected and that it is acceptable to have a strong leader above the law. That the views of ordinary people should prevail is not significantly associated with scientific conspiracy beliefs, while anti-immigration attitudes and thinking that obedience and respect for authority are the most important values that children should learn are not significantly associated with general conspiracy beliefs. Thus, with regards to Covid-19 conspiracy belief, hypotheses 1, 2 and 3 are all confirmed, while for scientific and general conspiracy beliefs the evidence largely supports these too with at least five out of the seven populist questions reaching levels of statistical significance for each.

It is also worthwhile paying attention to size of the coefficients themselves: we see that not all of the populist items are associated with belief in the different conspiracies to the same degree. Anti-immigration attitudes for instance are more strongly associated with Covid-19 conspiracy beliefs than with general conspiracy beliefs, while feeling that it is acceptable to have a strong leader above the law is more strongly associated with general conspiracy beliefs than with Covid-19 ones.

Regarding the traditional/Green attitudes, both being more supportive of same-sex rights and being more worried about climate change are significantly associated with lower belief in all Covid-19 and scientific conspiracies, and same-sex rights is additionally significantly associated with the general conspiracy mentality. Therefore, hypotheses 4 and 5 are accepted.

Trust in scientists is generally a strong predictor of all conspiracy beliefs, with greater trust being associated with lower conspiracy belief. As one would expect, the magnitude of the association is highest for the scientific conspiracy belief. Greater political and interpersonal trust are also negatively associated with belief in each conspiracy, but generally with coefficients that are much smaller than for the trust in scientists’ variable.

Left-right self-placement is often put forward as an important correlate of conspiracy beliefs. In our models it is only statistically significant in the case of Covid-19 beliefs. In a robustness test (see Appendix Figure A2), we operationalise this as a five-category variable to test for non-linearity. This shows that those in the centre-left are in fact less likely to believe in scientific and general conspiracies than those furthest to the left, while there is no difference in beliefs between those furthest to the left and furthest to the right for these two conspiracies.

Believing that government should reduce income differences is associated with increased Covid-19 and scientific conspiracy belief, but not with belief in general conspiracies. Those who are less satisfied with democracy are more likely to believe in general and science conspiracies, but not Covid-19 ones. Lower political efficacy and political interest are associated with greater conspiracy belief, but not significantly so for science conspiracy belief in the former case or for general conspiracy belief for either. ⁷

Thus far, we have presented the results from our full model. Building up the model more slowly would enable us to adjudicate on the extent to which inserting particular groups of variables may erode the associations between the different conspiracy beliefs and populist attitudes. Thus, in Figure 4, we present the coefficients for the populist variables initially when they are the sole variables in the model (panel 1), and then when the model is built up with demographics (panel 2), other political variables (panel 3), traditional/Green attitudes (panel 4) and trust variables (panel 5).

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Figure 4.

Mixed effect multi-level models of conspiracy beliefs – model build-up.

We see the associations between populist attitudes and conspiracy beliefs do indeed become more muted as the model builds up. These are most evident with the introduction of the political variables in panel 3 (whereby the significant association between believing that ordinary people’s views should prevail loses significance for Covid-19 and scientific conspiracies) and with the introduction of the trust variables in panel 5 (whereby the association between the anti-immigration attitudes and conspiracies in particular is dampened).

A key question that we have not yet empirically addressed is whether the associations between conspiracy beliefs in Western Europe are particularly different from those in Central and Eastern Europe. To do this, based on the full model, we added a Western European dummy as well as an interaction term between this and – in separate models – each of the populist items. The results for these are displayed in Figure 5. Do note that each row represents the interaction term from a separate model whereby there is only one interaction term per model.

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Figure 5.

Interactions between populist attitudes and region [from separate models] (95% CI).

For most of the populist items, we do not find differences between the regions, so while the levels of conspiracy beliefs are higher in Central and Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe that does not mean that populist attitudes necessarily differently explain these. There are, however, some important exceptions. In Western Europe, anti-immigration attitudes matter more for explaining Covid-19 conspiracy beliefs. In Central and Eastern Europe, believing that decisions should be made nationally rather than by the European Union matter more for explaining both scientific and general conspiracy beliefs. This aligns with previously mentioned literature that argued that traditionalist cultural positions particularly shape the Central-Eastern populist radical right anti-EU stances.

Thus far, analysis has concentrated on individual-level explanations. We next examine contextual-level explanations (see Table 1). For each conspiracy there are three models. The first looks solely at whether there is a difference between countries classified as being Western European or not; the second introduces the three contextual-level variable of corruption, Covid-19 mortality rates and GDP PPP PC, while – though these coefficients are not displayed in the table – the third model adds the individual-level variables as discussed in the previous section. ⁸

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Table 1.

Mixed effect multilevel models of belief in conspiracy statements, macro-level variables.

	Covid-19			Science			General
	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3
WE Dummy	-0.61*** (0.12)	-0.17 (0.11)	-0.04 (0.14)	-0.55*** (0.10)	-0.27** (0.10)	-0.13 (0.13)	-0.56*** (0.14)	-0.18 (0.12)	-0.06 (0.12)
Corruption		0.74** (0.22)	0.34  + (0.18)		0.89*** (0.22)	0.61** (0.21)		1.01** (0.30)	0.74** (0.23)
COVID-19 deaths per 100k		0.00(0.00)	0.00(0.00)		-0.00(0.00)	-0.00(0.00)		-0.00(0.00)	-0.00(0.00)
GDP PPP PC (Per 1,000)		-0.01(0.01)	0.00(0.00)		-0.00(0.00)	0.00(0.00)		-0.01(0.01)	-0.00(0.00)
Intercept	3.00*** (0.09)	2.68*** (0.35)	2.21*** (0.21)	2.94*** (0.08)	2.84** (0.28)	2.84*** (0.20)	3.11*** (0.10)	3.03*** (0.43)	2.85*** (0.28)
Random Intercept (Country)	0.09(0.02)	0.05(0.01)	0.04(0.01)	0.06(0.02)	0.03(0.01)	0.03(0.01)	0.12(0.02)	0.07(0.02)	0.05(0.01)
Countries	28	28	28	28	28	28	28	28	28
Sample Size	39,196	39,196	39,196	39,427	39,427	39,427	39,350	39,350	39,350

Robust standard errors in parentheses; *** p < 0.001; **p < 0.01; *p < 0.05; ⁺ p < 0.10.

Model 1 includes just the country dummy; model 2 adds the contextual level variables; model 3 adds the individual-level variables as set out in the data section, with the exception of trust in scientists (due to it not being asked in Czechia and Estonia, and the wish to maximise level-2 variance; these are not displayed).

As suggested in Figure 1, individuals in Western Europe are less likely to agree with the conspiracy statements. However, this geographic variation is mostly explained away by the introduction of the other contextual variables in model 2. In the case of Covid-19 and general conspiracies, the significance completely disappears. In the case of the science conspiracy, the magnitude halves. Of these contextual factors, levels of government corruption are what is associated with each. In countries with higher levels of corruption, more people believed in conspiracies, with the magnitude highest for the general conspiracy mentality. In model 3 when the individual-level variables are introduced, the differences between the two sides of the continent notably disappear. While the corruption index coefficient is reduced in size – most notably for belief in the Covid-19 conspiracy where this halves in magnitude – it remains statistically significant at the p < 0.05 level for science and general conspiracy belief and reduced to the p < 0.10 level for Covid-19 conspiracy beliefs. Therefore, while the individual-level factors explain away much of the contextual-level differences, corruption still holds explanatory power.

Given the emergent importance of corruption, in Figure 6 we plot the marginal effect of it for belief in each of the three conspiracies using the models from model 3 in Table 1 and keeping every other variable at their mean value. Keeping in mind that the conspiracy belief dependent variables are coded from 1–5, as one goes from 0 to 0.7 on the corruption scale, ⁹ the probability of having a general conspiracy mindset rises over half a point on the conspiracy scale from 2.56 to 3.08. This is not insubstantial, especially considering everything else that is being controlled for. The increase in magnitude for the scientists’ conspiracy is a little less at 0.42 and for Covid-19 conspiracies the least at 0.24. While conspiracy belief is usually held to be harmful, the plausibility of conspiracies actually occurring in more corrupt countries may be higher (Alper and Imhoff, 2023), which could spill over into believing in false as well as true ones.

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Figure 6.

Marginal effect of belief in conspiracies base on corruption index (95% CI).

Two robustness tests are carried out on the results of Table 1. First, the models are run without the Western European dummy, and the results remain robust (see Appendix Table A4). Second, the 2021 values of the Corruption Perception Index (Transparency International and Our World in Data, 2024) are used instead of the V-Dem corruption index (se Appendix Table A5). For models with only the contextual-level variables, the Corruption Perception Index coefficient remains statistically significant for all three dependent variables. When the individual-level variables are additionally added, it is only statistically significant for the General Conspiracy dependent variable.

Discussion and conclusions

In this article we analysed if populist radical right attitudes – that is anti-elitist, nativist and authoritarian attitudes – helped predict belief across 28 European countries in a Covid-19 conspiracy theory, a science conspiracy theory and general conspiracy thinking. We found that four out of seven populist radical right attitudes examined consistently predict belief in the three levels of conspiracy theories here analysed across the continent: that minority rights should not be respected, that decisions be made nationally rather than by the European Union, support for referendums as a means to give voice to the people and support for a strong leader above the law. ¹⁰

Based on these findings, we argued that support for decisions being made at the national level and for referendums being significant correlates of all our conspiracy belief dependent variables highlight the anti-establishment nature of the populist radical right, showing the deep distrust that certain people have of political elites and representatives (at the national and European level). These attitudes have been shown to predict belief in conspiracy theories (Enders et al., 2023; Krouwel and Van Prooijen, 2021), whose core definitional element posits that elites carry out malevolent secret actions for their own benefit (Sunstein and Vermeule, 2009).

Moreover, the result regarding rejection of minority right protections highlighted the nativist nature of the populist radical right and its dissatisfaction with liberal democracies that set systems of checks and balances to prevent majority tyranny, something which can foster populist in-group frustration, and out-group scapegoating. This would explain belief in conspiracy theories that blame out-groups for perceived shortcomings of ‘the people’.

Finally, support for authoritarian leaders above the law being important reflected the populist radical right belief that certain leaders have the power to embody the will of ‘the people’ and execute it to its final consequences, regardless of potential democratic checks and balances. The association we found between authoritarianism and the three levels of conspiracy theory belief may indicate why those with populist radical right attitudes may be inclined to support political ‘outsiders’ to defeat the conspiring evil elites.

In addition, we tested whether there were particular populist radical right attitudes that mattered more for explaining conspiracies in one part of the continent than the other. This allowed us to test whether some of the different attitudes that populist radical right supporters showed in the East and West of Europe – for instance in terms of nativism (Santana et al., 2020; Zagórski and Santana, 2021) and anti-elitism (Rama and Santana, 2023) – were associated with different conspiracy belief outcomes. Despite significant differences between both continental blocs in terms of general levels of belief in the three levels of conspiracy theories, there were few examples of populist radical right attitudes being more strongly associated with conspiracy beliefs in one region compared to the other. ¹¹ That some differences remain is still notable, and yet the similar associations between regions for most populist radical right attitudes is striking. It may be that increasing convergence between populist radical right politics across both regions, as has been noted elsewhere (Pytlas, 2018), may have reduced some important differences that previously existed with Central and Eastern European countries that might have been reflected in belief in the conspiracy theories otherwise. Without the presence of longitudinal data, we cannot adjudicate on such claim. This highlights the importance for future research of collecting time series data on how conspiratorial attitudes evolve over time across the continent to be able to tackle such research questions. While the use of high-quality ESS data has been vital for our present analyses, future research may wish to examine the associations with populist radical right attitudes and conspiracy beliefs across a wider variety of specific conspiracies.

In the analyses of demographics contained in the Appendix, it is also worth underlining the consistency with which feelings of household economic hardship are positively related to each conspiracy. At the contextual level, higher levels of corruption are consistently associated with higher beliefs in all conspiracies. These results suggest that governments should make addressing systematic corruption – perhaps enhancing transparency – and economic inequality – thus addressing certain citizens’ economic hardship – part of their policy approach to fight the spread of conspiracy theories.

In summary, this article highlights the importance of studying the relationship between populist radical right attitudes in Europe and belief in conspiracy theories. These findings are important, given the potential adverse effects that conspiracy theory beliefs have for liberal democracies (Jolley et al., 2022). In terms of the consequences conspiracy theories have for public and personal health standards, the Covid-19 pandemic rendered a number of assessable outcomes, such as vaccine hesitancy, opposition to prevention measures or violent protests against governmental institutions. Conspiracy theories are also a powerful tool for social and political groups that have a narrow and exclusionary understanding of their identity, where conspiracy theories are used to scapegoat people who do not fit their definition of self. In this sense, this article sheds light on the general correlation between anti-pluralist populist radical right attitudes such as opposition to minority rights and the three levels of conspiracy theory belief that are analysed. This, in turn, can also be exploited for the promotion of violence and extremism, addressed at outsiders and democratic political institutions. Therefore, understanding the relationship between populist far-right attitudes and conspiracy theory belief can be vital for national and transnational democratic institutions in terms of their ability to coordinate responses to the threat they pose, whether during health crises, violent antidemocratic uprisings, or ethnic, ideological, partisan or sectarian violence.

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