![]() The COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the spread of fake news, misinformation, and conspiracy theories worldwide. Findings are discussed in terms of the consequences of conspiracy belief on democratic engagement. We also found a curvilinear relationship between political ideology with heightened belief in conspiracies at both ideological extremes and the centre. General conspiracy belief was also a unique contributor to lower satisfaction with the government. Left-wing political ideology, trust in politicians, and political efficacy accounted for most of the explained variance in satisfaction with the government. Using a national probability sample of adults from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study during 2020 (17-99 years old M=48.59, SD=13.86 63% women, 37% men N=41,487), we examined the associations between agreement with general conspiracy beliefs and political indicators of intention to vote and satisfaction with government, alongside political factors including trust in politicians, political efficacy, identity centrality, and political ideology. Our results thus indicate that conspiracy believers tend to be dissatisfied with the democratic system in which they live, which would lead them to be more prone to use violent and illegal means in order to achieve social change. Moreover, this effect seemed to be specific to nonnormative and violent political action. A second (pre-registered) study (N = 292) replicated this finding. As expected, the associations between conspiracy mentality and both intentions to engage in nonnormative political actions and radicalism intentions were fully mediated by individuals' satisfaction with democracy. The results of our first study (N = 248) corroborated this hypothesis. Bringing together these three lines of research, we hypothesized that individuals' level of satisfaction with democracy will mediate the positive association between conspiracy mentality and intentions to use political violence. The scientific literature on conspiracy theories indicates that (1) conspiracy believers show a greater tendency to use violent means to obtain social change, that (2) they also tend to be dissatisfied with the democratic system in which they live (even denying its democratic character), and (3) this type of dissatisfaction predisposes to the use of political violence. The paper also introduces a number of new concepts, such as conspiracy mobilizations and conspiracy coalitions. ![]() ![]() On the basis of this premise, the first part of this article reviews the existing literature on conspiracy theories, also identifying the main lacunae the second part outlines some possible research questions and lines of inquiry, moving beyond the classical theories in the field of social movement studies. Applying the social movements toolkit can allow to better understand this phenomenon and apply critical perspectives in a more effective manner. Moving from such a perspective to a constructivist one, I argue that conspiracy theories should represent an object of interest for social movement scholars: conspiracies supporters go into the streets to highlight their issues, protest against authority, propose alternative lifestyles and often claim to look for a better/different society. These accounts have often adopted a stigmatizing approach, looking at conspiracy theories as forms of pathologies (whether psychological, social or political). A considerable amount of the work on these topics has been produced in political science, history, media studies, social psychology and other disciplines. It is surprising to note the scarcity of contributions in social movement literature related to so-called conspiracy theories. ![]()
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