Does Country Setting Make a Difference? A Cross‐National Study on the Relationship Between Political Ideology and Conspiracy Mentality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Objective The objective of this research is to investigate the relationship between political ideology and conspiracy beliefs across various country settings. In doing so, this research builds on the academic debate of whether the effect of left‐right ideological placement on conspiracy beliefs is linear, curvilinear (i.e., people to the extremes have a higher likelihood to believe in conspiracy theories), or tilted to the right (i.e., the likelihood of individuals believing in conspiracy theories increases for people on the [far] right of the political spectrum). Methods We rely on original cross‐national data from eight countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Lebanon, Morocco, South Africa, and the United States) to investigate the strength and shape of the ideology‐conspiracy belief relationship ( N = 8101). Results Our results show that the relationship between political ideology is context specific. We also display that a simple categorical modeling strategy capturing the left, right, and center can provide an equally well if not a better model fit in some countries than the more complicated polynomial regression models that previous research suggest. Conclusion The relationship between political ideology and conspiracy theories is one that is highly dependent on context. This research warns researchers to consider the country context of a study before making methodological and analytical choices in studying political ideology and conspiracy beliefs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".