Political Efficacy, Ideology and Cross-Domain Conspiracy Beliefs in Ireland

Join us for a special presentation by our international visiting scholar Professor Jane Suiter from Dublin City University

How and for whom do conspiracy beliefs travel across domains in a high-trust democracy? As a case study, Ireland maintains high institutional trust while also exhibiting widespread conspiracy belief, with roughly half the population unsure of whether a given conspiracy theory is true or not. Using data with a representative sample, the 2024 Irish Election Study, we investigated the trends associated with conspiratorial thinking and the drivers of cross-domain support for specific conspiracy theories.

Deploying three models — ordinary least squares regressors, random forest regressors, and random forest classifiers – we found clear support for a monological view of conspiratorial thinking. Belief in one conspiracy was the strongest predictor of belief in others, even when the conspiracies are conceptually unrelated. Once feelings of political efficacy were taken into account, demographic characteristics lost most of their explanatory power for both institutional trust and conspiracy beliefs. Political efficacy emerged as the single strongest predictor of general conspiracy belief, highlighting the importance of perceived voice and influence in shaping susceptibility to conspiratorial narratives. However, trust in institutions had the highest permutation importance of all predictors of conspiracy belief, seeming to override the effect of political efficacy when modelled together.

Lower levels of conspiratorial thinking were associated with higher trust in, rather than greater use of, journalistic news media, pointing to the centrality of perceived media reliability over simple exposure. For ideologically inflected conspiracies, however, content still mattered. Beliefs and issue positions that aligned with globalist conspiracy narratives—particularly attitudes towards immigration and ethnic minorities— were the most important predictors of dismissal and affirmation of those conspiracies. Interestingly, these ideological variables are predictive of affirmation across all types of conspiracy measured, but only predict rejection of globalist claims. By contrast, these ideological variables are much less relevant for the dismissal of conspiracies, where they only significantly predict rejection of globalist claims. This work demonstrates how efficacy and ideology jointly structure conspiracy attribution and dismissal, even in a high-trust setting like Ireland.

Biography

Jane Suiter is Professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University and director of DCU's Institute for Future Media, Democracy and Society. , her research focus is on the information environment in the public sphere and in particular on scaling up deliberation and tackling disinformation.

Jane was awarded an IRC Laureate in 2022 for COMDEL Examining the Potential of Communicative Deliberation for Climate Action, and is a member of the Irish National Election and Democracy Study. She has been involved in various research and oversight capacities on the Irish Citizens' Assembly (2012-2022) ) he was the joint winner of the Brown Democracy Medal in 2019.