What motivates governments and other political actors to promote conspiracy theories? And what impact do these theories have on society? Drawing on a new book covering Russia and the post-Soviet region, Scott Radnitz explores the causes, consequences, and contradictions of conspiracism in politics.
Conspiracy theories have been in the news of late, often in discussions about the harmful spread of misinformation on social media. This ‘horizontal’ contagion of conspiracy theories through interpersonal networks is certainly alarming, but it distracts our attention from an important phenomenon in much of the world that is often overlooked by scholars of established democracies: the deliberate top-down promotion of conspiracy theories by political elites. This manifestation of conspiracy theories, as strategic political rhetoric rather than misguided belief, is the subject of my new book, Revealing Schemes.
The book takes in 12 post-Soviet states over 20 years. It treats conspiracy claims as one of several tools in the rhetorical arsenal of political actors and aims to explain when and how conspiracy theories emerge and endure. Paying attention to the media environment in this region reveals that conspiracy theories are rarely voiced by public officials in some countries and time periods, whereas they may appear episodically or even become ubiquitous in others. Having spent several years compiling a database of over 1,500 conspiracy claims from the post-Soviet media with the help of a dozen assiduous research assistants, I make several counterintuitive arguments based on this data.
First, conspiracy theories are more likely to appear in somewhat competitive rather than fully authoritarian regimes. According to the conventional wisdom, the most conspiratorial forms of government are dictatorships, where rulers supposedly maintain unbridled power by fulminating against enemies, distracting from poor governance, and dividing the citizenry against itself. But in fact, the most repressive regimes in the region, such as in Turkmenistan, Belarus, and Azerbaijan rarely resort to conspiracy, preferring instead to spew ordinary self-serving propaganda through the state-controlled media.
Instead, it is leaders in more competitive regimes such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan – not quite full democracies, since we are, after all, in the post-Soviet region – where conspiracy claims flourish. This is because the need to win elections and the presence of pluralistic media and independent organisations means that incumbents must compete for votes, often against challengers who can lob their own allegations in the mass media and even engage in conspiracy mongering themselves.
A second insight comes in an examination of the ascendancy of conspiracism in Russia – a case that deserves special treatment and gets its own chapter. Two existing narratives predominate: that Russia is cursed to have conspiratorial leaders and citizens owing to its traumatic history of invasion, violence, and tyranny; or that conspiracism is the sole handiwork of President Vladimir Putin, the master spy and scourge of democracy. One posits inevitability, the other, agency. I show that neither story is quite correct.
Although Communists and nationalists in the 1990s extensively propagated conspiracy claims about Gorbachev, the Soviet collapse, the CIA, and the expansion of NATO, officials in the Yeltsin era and the first years of Putin’s reign mostly refrained from voicing conspiracy claims, even when there were clear opportunities to do so, such as after the attack on a Moscow theatre by Chechen militants in 2002, or in relation to NATO’s decision to welcome former Warsaw Pact members into the alliance. Instead, it was a confluence of events that appeared to pose a significant threat to Russia’s sovereignty and great power status that moved Russia toward what I term a regime of sustained official conspiracism. What began as a defensive response by the Kremlin to such challenges in 2004 and 2005 became a concerted strategy to maintain a steady flow of conspiratorial discourse into the public sphere through an increasingly state-controlled press.
Scholars of politics, even in Western democracies, must move beyond viewing conspiracy theories as an aberrant or exotic type of belief and instead treat them as an ordinary form of political rhetoric that will not disappear anytime soon.
A third argument in the book is that the excessive use of conspiracy theories can backfire on their claimants. Overuse of the tactic threatens to call a regime’s credibility into question, as people may begin to doubt claims of future nefarious activity when previous dire prognostications did not come to pass. Excessive conspiracism can be read as a signal of regime weakness, as people may wonder what the government did to acquire so many determined enemies. And it can lead to fatigue, as additional claims lose their power to shock and recede into mere background noise.
I show, by analysing surveys, survey experiments, and focus groups from Georgia and Kazakhstan, that conspiracy claims, when voiced by officials, do not necessarily lead to political support. Once exposed to conspiracy theories by elites, cynical citizens may come to suspect that the very leaders who level accusations against others are themselves complicit in the secretive abuse of power for personal gain, in other words, of engaging in conspiracies. Thus, although some regimes perceive conspiracy theories as an effective tactic to build political support, their rhetoric may succeed only in making people more suspicious in general, leading them to question the motives of conspiracy claimants.
What does this all mean for the rest of us? When I began researching for this book in the pre-Trump era, it was going to be a story about a fascinating and complicated region with a flawed record of consolidating sovereignty and institutionalising pluralism. It later became clear that many of my arguments apply even in consolidated democracies, where conspiracy theories were once relegated to the margins. Factors such as polarisation and rising distrust have undermined respect for neutral institutions that adjudicate factual claims, while eroding norms against promoting conspiracy theories in the political arena. As in the post-Soviet cases in my book, political competition in Europe and the US provides incentives for politicians to take factual shortcuts.
None of this means conspiracy theories are destined to predominate, even if they persist as a mainstream political discourse. Where there is pluralistic media, there will be both an audience for conspiracy theories and the means to marshal the facts to counter them. And if politicians find that they do not pay electoral dividends, they are likely to resort to alternative appeals.
Yet once the dam has been broken, conspiracy theories are unlikely to disappear as a viable form of rhetoric, especially if parties must only mobilise a disaffected minority of voters to gain a legislative foothold. France and the UK are not about to become Russia or Ukraine. But the post-Soviet example can be instructive. Scholars of politics, even in Western democracies, must move beyond viewing conspiracy theories as an aberrant or exotic type of belief and instead treat them as an ordinary form of political rhetoric that will not disappear anytime soon.
For more information, see the author’s new book, Revealing Schemes: The Politics of Conspiracy in Russia and the Post-Soviet Region (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: European Council
Great topic, good but flawed analysis.
You badly need to distinguish totalitarian and revolutionary regimes from authoritarian regimes. Totalitarian and revolutionary regimes are inherently prone to conspiracy theory. Authoritarian regimes much less so. Stable liberal democracies also less so, but unstable liberal democracies, and democracies with revolutionary origins like the US are quite prone to them.
Totalitarian regimes operate in fact as conspiracies against established society, and define in advance the established world as a conspiracy against themselves; and revolutionary regimes tend to do similarly. Orwell was not having a mistaken paranoid fantasy when he wrote of the inner party as a conspiratorial entity, using its special privileges to know actual facts and discuss how to manipulate actual reality while still practicing its official doublethink; nor were James Burnham and Bertrand Russell in their books on which Orwell built. Totalitarian regimes tend to be hyper-democratic in a sense, constantly mobilizing society; authoritarian regimes are far more interested in stability and pacification of the societal mood.
Nor was it a fantasy of Burnham and Orwell and their neo-conservative successors who became the leaders of American sociology, to see the Western, somewhat more moderate progressive classes or elites as having too much in common with the extreme Soviet one in its conspiratorial aspects; among them, the habit of speaking in the name of the poor while enhancing their own power in the process, having a now-you-see-it-now you don’t characteristic, denying their own existence as a powerful class with an interest that could be different from the classes in whose name they spoke, and thinking of the people as “not ready” to know the truth and too full of deplorable prejudices, and therefore needing to be spoon-fed a narrative that will tell them what to think but avoid telling them facts that they might “draw the wrong conclusions” from. This is a troubling factor, to put it mildly. It is a repeated conspiratorial behavior, by the very groups that we hear most often deploring conspiracy theories and imagining themselves free from it. Since I was brought up to be a part of those groups and imbibed those quasi-conspiratorial attitudes toward the people almost with my mother’s milk, it is something I perceive to some extent from my insides, confirmed sadly by pervasive public evidence of it almost on a daily basis. It also took me some years
Post-totalitarian and post-revolutionary regimes and societies — and that includes all the post-Soviet space and, interestingly, the U.S.A. — inherit a lot of conspiracy-theory mental habits, which can persist for decades and centuries. So do institutions such as the FSB and its precursor the Okhrana — and most intelligence agencies everywhere, in usually lesser degrees fortunately. It is a milieu that obviously influences Putin, although he also shown awareness in his early reformist years of how badly its conspiratorial mentality can provide misleading guidance. Thus the books of the great historians, Bernard Bailyn and Bryon Davis, on conspiracy theory in American history. Today’s American penchant for conspiracy theory is rooted in the persistence of the embrace and idealization of the Declaration of Independence, with its quite strong use of conspiracy theory, as the font for political legitimacy in America. It is found massively in both parties; you damage your case by restricting mention to the one deplored by the predominant progressive trend in academia and the media, In fact the progressive side was considerably more prone to conspiratorialism in the several decades prior to Trump — basically, after the decline of the Birch Society and the replacement of its conspiratorialism by that of the New Left — than the conservative side, and there is practically nothing conspiracy-theory-wise said and done by Trump that hasn’t been said and done by the mainstream and progressive side far more frequently and persistently over these decades.
One last concern. You badly need to stop the increasingly widespread mainstream misuse of the word “conspiracy” to mean “conspiracy theory”. The terms are opposites, and the growing conflation of them destroys the capacity to think rationally about the problem.
Real conspiracies exist. The vast bulk of police investigations and of investigative reporting consists of liiking into them. “Conspiracy theory” is not just a theory that there is a conspiracy, which in fact there often is. Nor it is just a mistaken theory that there is a conspiracy; loads of people and police and investigative reporters make mistakes on this without necessarily being conspiracy theorists.
Rather, “conspiracy theory” refers – prior to its current overgeneralized misuse – to a grand historical narrative in which the apparent world history is just a smokescreen for a conspiracy that has been running the world all these decades and centuries. That is what I was writing about in my article in the Christian Science Monitor about the role of conspiracy theory in underpinning the Oklahoma City bombing in the 1990s: a grand world-historical conspiracy theory.
This doesn’t mean that all such world-historical conspiracy theories are necessarily false either, and certainly not that they are merely false. The main one, the sort of motherlode for most conspiracy theories – the theory of the Jew-Masonic-Illuminatti-British-International Bankers’ Conspiracy – is indeed fundamentally false. But they all have to be examined for truth content rather than pronounced a priori false. I have never examined a single one of them, not even the Jew-Masonic-Bankers Conspiracy one, that does not have a grain of truth that it has been important for me to learn from, even while it is vitally important to prevent its mound of falsehood and its overall mentality from gaining influence. And I say that as a Jew whose mother’s Polish family was mostly wiped out by the Nazis with their conspiracy theories about the Jews and their liberal-Communist collaborators; while my Jewish ex-Soviet roommate’s family was mostly wiped out by the Communists with their somehow “respectable” conspiracy theories about the bourgeoisie and their petty bourgeois “collaborators”. And no, the latter is not a respectable sociological theory telling us important truths as distinct from being a conspiracy theory. All grand conspiracy theories are also sociological theories telling us truths that are often important; otherwise they would not be so dangerous. We have to know honestly about the virtues of even the most evil theories, in order to combat the terrible dangers in them.
with my best wishes to you and thanks for the importance of what you’re writing about and the illumination you’ve provided on it — despite all these critical observations, which I think are also important enough to be worth my writing them down and calling to your attention.