Defending or Defying Democracy? Reinvestigating the Relationship Between Conspiracy Beliefs and Support for Democratic Principles.

The storm on the US Capitol on 6th of January 2021 demonstrates the conflicted relationship between conspiracy beliefs and democratic attitudes: While conspiracy believers claim to be defenders of democracy, research shows that conspiracy believers hold a plethora of potentially democracy-endangering attitudes and beliefs. Therefore, the studies at hand reinvestigate the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and their support for democratic principles. We hypothesize that the operationalization of conspiracy beliefs is important for the relationship at hand: We expect that implausible conspiracy beliefs are related to a lower support for democratic attitudes, and that this relationship exists for other implausible beliefs, too. In three cross-sectional survey studies conducted in the US and the UK, we indeed find evidence that people who endorse implausible conspiracy theories are less likely to support democratic principles. Furthermore, this relationship exists for other implausible beliefs, such as the tendency to perceive nonsense statements as profound, too. At the same time, we do not find evidence for the idea that believing in plausible conspiracy theories is related to support for democratic principles. The research at hand sheds light on the importance of the operationalization of conspiracy beliefs. Additionally, it calls researchers to demonstrate the unique contribution of conspiracy beliefs over and above overlapping or confounding variables, such shared thinking styles or political orientation. And lastly, it discussed the potential influence of careless responders in skewed variables such as conspiracy beliefs and support for democratic principles.