2021 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
A Cross-National Study of Conspiracy Theory Beliefs and their Influence on Political Behaviour
| Project/Area Number |
21K13236
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| Research Institution | Waseda University |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2021-04-01 – 2024-03-31
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| Keywords | conspiracy theories / political behaviour / polarisation / populism / comparative politics / social media / survey research |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
This research project aims to use a combination of public opinion surveys and social media data to examine how belief in conspiracy theories influences political behaviour in a variety of national contexts. Work on this project remains at an early stage, as starting the project was delayed until late 2021 due to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, through working with colleagues in Japan and overseas, a series of pilot questions related to conspiracy theories and political violence have been inserted into electoral surveys in the United States and Japan (2021), and Hungary and the Philippines (2022), providing an initial comparative data set for the research project.
Initial analysis of data from these surveys suggests that conspiracy beliefs may be significantly more salient than populist attitudes in determining citizens' propensity to justify or condone political violence. This finding will help to guide the structure of future survey research on this topic, which will need to explore the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and populist attitudes in more depth.
Early results from this research project have focused on analysis of survey data from Japan, with a brief outline being published in Yoron, the Journal of the Japanese Association for Public Opinion Research. A paper exploring similar results from the United States is currently under review for an international journal, and a more complete overview of the project was given at a WIAS Workshop presentation at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study in early 2022.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
This project was delayed for some months in 2021 as a knock-on effect to delays to the completion of my PhD thesis caused by issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, a series of test questions were included in four major electoral surveys during 2021 and early 2022, allowing work on the project to proceed rapidly and make up for any delays in 2022.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
The next steps for this project will be to analyse the data gathered from electoral surveys in Japan, the United States, Hungary, and the Philippines, and use these insights both to publish research papers on the influence of conspiracy beliefs on those elections, and to devise a more refined set of survey questions for inclusion in future studies. By late 2022, conspiracy-related questions will have been included in a number of further electoral surveys, while a more complete battery of questions will be tested in focused survey experiments conducted as follow-up surveys several months after the electoral surveys were run. This research will proceed into 2023 when the core objective is the publication and testing of a cross-nationally effective survey battery on conspiracy beliefs which will be open for use by any and all researchers.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Due to my collaborations with research teams conducting electoral surveys in a number of countries, it was possible to conduct my initial studies without using my own budget for this purpose. Consequently, the budget originally intended for use in the first year of the project will now be used to increase the scope of the second year of the project, allowing for larger-scale surveys with more statistical power to be conducted across a wider range of target countries. This change to the budget structure of the project is purely financial and should not impact the overall timelines for completing work on the project.
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Research Products
(2 results)
