Abstract
Conspiracy theories are usually defined as explanations of social facts according to which groups of extremely powerful actors secretly influence the economic, political, and social systems in a way that goes beyond what is realistic to expect in an open society. With the pandemic crisis, the so-called “infodemic” and the consequences that it led to (in terms of vaccination rates and compliance to health regulations) made clear that conspiracy theories and people who believe in them are here to stay, and that can harm the social and political fabric of liberal democracies. The literature on the topic mainly focused on conspiracy theories’ believers, their political and demographic characteristics, their psychological traits, and their reactions to new theories. Another line of research analyzed the production of these theories, namely, the (mainly virtual) places in which they are produced and diffused. The SUSPECTS project aims at integrating and expanding these two strands of the literature, by proposing a supply-and-demand theoretical framework: according to our framework, the ecosystem that encompasses the consumption and production of conspiracy theories can be seen as a market, in which conspiracy theories are “produced” and “sold” by relevant actors -such as influencers, public figures, but also (and more concerningly) politicians. At the same time, the theories are “consumed” by the general audience, or by particularly receptive parts of it. More specifically, SUSPECTS aims at analyzing the ways in which specific politicians and political leaders are able to exploit conspiracy theories in order to increase their popularity. Applying a supply-and-demand framework to the conspiracy theories’ ecosystems represents a potential leap forward in analyzing the phenomenon, as it allows to explicitly take into account both the mass public and a political elite that seems to be increasingly attracted by more aggressive/fringe types of communication. The project investigates the demand and supply of conspiracism in six European countries (Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Sweden and Poland). The project has 3 main aims. 1) By using quantitative social media analysis, we will investigate the environments in which the demand and supply of conspiracy theories emerge. We will study the role that conspiracist groups have in producing and disseminating these theories, with particular reference to the connections that these groups have with political entrepreneurs. 2) By using qualitative analysis of leaders’ political communication, we will investigate the “supply side” of the conspiracist ecosystem, focusing on the ways in which political leaders contribute to spreading theories. 3) by using original survey data, we investigate the "demand-side”; by focusing on how much citizens are influenced by conspiracist communication enacted by politicians and conspiracy theorists, and which strategies are more likely to be successful.
Results achieved
The core results of the SUSPECTS project consist in the construction of an original, integrated empirical infrastructure for the comparative study of conspiracy theories along the project’s three analytical dimensions – demand, supply, and communicative diffusion. The research produced three interconnected datasets: an original cross-national mass survey, a large-scale archive of social-media communication by Members of the European Parliament, and a qualitative archive of political leaders’ speeches. Together they allow the project to link, within a single framework, the individual predispositions that make citizens receptive to conspiratorial claims (the demand side) and the strategies through which political elites produce and circulate conspiratorial cues (the supply side). The first result is a large comparative survey dataset measuring the demand for conspiracy theories across contemporary democracies. It was fielded in eight countries – the six core European countries of the project (Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Sweden, and Poland) plus the United Kingdom and the United States – with approximately 2,500 respondents each (about 20,000 interviews) and national quotas for gender, age, education, and macro-region. Fieldwork was timed around the 2024 electoral cycle: in Italy, Spain, Germany, Sweden, and Poland in the two weeks after the June 2024 European Parliament elections; in France and the United Kingdom around the snap legislative and general elections of early July 2024; and in the United States in late November 2024, after the presidential election. The questionnaire covers conspiracist belief, cognitive and affective susceptibility, political trust, ideological orientations and propensity-to-vote scores, social identities, support for democratic norms, and scales for populism, anti-elitism, cynicism, and perceived victimhood. Its most distinctive output is a new comparative conspiracy belief scale, psychometrically validated through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and multi-group models establishing partial measurement invariance across the eight countries; unlike conventional “conspiracy mentality” instruments, it captures substantive conspiratorial content while remaining cross-nationally comparable. The second result is a large-scale archive of political communication on social media. With the authorisation of X/Twitter, the project retrieved the complete timelines of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2024 – a full legislative cycle (9th and 10th legislatures) culminating in the 2024 European elections and spanning high-salience crises (the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the 7 October 2023 attacks) known to fuel conspiratorial discourse. The corpus comprises about 870,000 tweets by MEPs from the six core countries, which together account for roughly 70% of the EU population. From it an annotated dataset of 63,288 tweets was built (up to 300 tweets each for the 223 active MEPs). Each tweet was classified with a large language model (GPT-4.1) following a purpose-built codebook operationalising three dimensions: “suspicion and strategic doubt” (a thin, allusive style), “hidden truth” (intermediate), and “explicit conspiracy” (a thick, overt style). Every entry retains metadata – authoring MEP, national and European party-group affiliation, timestamp, and likes – and three binary conspiracist indicators. Preliminary analyses are already informative: a conspiracist style appears in roughly 6–7% of tweets; the overt style rose from about 3–4% in early 2019 to nearly 10% by the end of 2024; conspiracist messages attract higher engagement; and such rhetoric concentrates among radical-right and radical-left actors. The third result is a qualitative archive of political speeches, which complements the social-media corpus by capturing conspiratorial communication in its more structured, rhetorically coherent form. It focuses on leaders of parties widely regarded as populist in Italy and France over 2015–2024, gathering about 150 speeches (some 30 per leader) for six figures: Luigi Di Maio and Giuseppe Conte (Movimento 5 Stelle), Giorgia Meloni (Fratelli d’Italia), Matteo Salvini (Lega), Jean-Luc Mélenchon (La France Insoumise), and Marine Le Pen (Rassemblement National). The texts – sourced from institutional websites, party archives, and media repositories – have been cleaned, segmented, and deposited together with the coding outputs. They are analysed through a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative discourse analysis with machine-assisted text analysis, using a predefined framework that identifies markers of populist rhetoric (anti-elitism, people-centrism), conspiratorial frames (hidden networks, malevolent intent), and associated cognitive biases (conjunction fallacy, proportionality and intentionality, confirmation and availability). Coding at the paragraph level yields per-speech and per-leader scores enabling systematic comparison across leaders, traditions, and time, and assessment of where populist rhetoric overlaps with conspiratorial framing. Taken together, these three datasets are not only the central deliverable of the project but, above all, the empirical foundation on which analyses of the relationship between the demand for and the supply of conspiracy theories have already been built and will continue to be developed – several at different stages of dissemination: some forthcoming, others submitted to peer-reviewed journals, others still in elaboration. Because the datasets share a common conceptual framework and harmonised measures, the survey, the tweet archive, and the speech collection can be analysed jointly – for example by relating the conspiracist communication style of parties and leaders to the conspiracist predispositions of their voters. Once anonymized and documented, they will be made public as a solid empirical basis for future comparative research on public opinion, political communication, and conspiracy theories.Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Salvatore Vassallo
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento delle Arti
Coordinatore:
Università degli Studi di TORINO(Italy)
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 81.871,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
28/09/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
