The DOI matches its Crossref record; 57 of the 57 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Elite Is Up to Something: Exploring the Relation Between Populism and Belief in Conspiracy Theories
Open accessAbstract
We explore the relationship between populist attitudes and conspiratorial beliefs on the individual level with two studies using American samples. First, we test whether and what kinds of conspiratorial beliefs predict populist attitudes. Our results show that belief in conspiracies with greedy, but not necessarily purely evil, elites are associated with populism. Second, we test whether having a conspiratorial mentality is associated with all separate sub‐dimensions of populist attitudes – people‐centrism, anti‐elitism, and a good‐versus‐evil view of politics. Results show a relation only with the first two, confirming the common tendency of both discourses to see the masses as victims on elites’ hands. These findings contribute to research on the correlates of populism at the individual level, which is essential to understanding why this phenomenon is so strong in contemporary democracies.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Hu, L., & Bentler, P. M. (1999) · Structural Equation Modeling A Multidisciplinary Journal · doi:10.1080/10705519909540118 · Cited by 108,788
lavaan : An R Package for Structural Equation Modeling
Rosseel, Y. (2012) · Journal of Statistical Software · doi:10.18637/jss.v048.i02 · Cited by 27,955
RUBIN, D. B. (1976) · Biometrika · doi:10.1093/biomet/63.3.581 · Cited by 9,925
Mudde, C. (2004) · Government and Opposition · doi:10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x · Cited by 5,286
Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe
Mudde, C. (2007) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511492037 · Cited by 4,694
Evaluating Online Labor Markets for Experimental Research: Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk
Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., & Lenz, G. S. (2012) · Political Analysis · doi:10.1093/pan/mpr057 · Cited by 4,008
Elder, J. W., Geertz, C., & Rosenhack, K. P. S. (1964) · Cited by 3,878
Beyond the Turk: Alternative platforms for crowdsourcing behavioral research
Peer, E., Brandimarte, L., Samat, S., & Acquisti, A. (2017) · Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2017.01.006 · Cited by 2,957
THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS
Converse, P. E. (2004) · Aarhus University Press eBooks · doi:10.2307/jj.35529187.18 · Cited by 2,499
Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy
Canovan, M. (1999) · Political Studies · doi:10.1111/1467-9248.00184 · Cited by 2,451
Cited by
Belief in conspiracy theories: Basic principles of an emerging research domain
van Prooijen, J., & Douglas, K. M. (2018) · European Journal of Social Psychology · doi:10.1002/ejsp.2530 · Cited by 483
Conspiracy theories and the conspiracy mindset: implications for political ideology
Sutton, R. M., & Douglas, K. M. (2020) · Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.02.015 · Cited by 264
Voter mobilisation in the echo chamber: Broadband internet and the rise of populism in Europe
SCHAUB, M., & MORISI, D. (2020) · European Journal of Political Research · doi:10.1111/1475-6765.12373 · Cited by 90
Characterizing networks of propaganda on twitter: a case study
Guarino, S., Trino, N., Celestini, A., Chessa, A., & Riotta, G. (2020) · Applied Network Science · doi:10.1007/s41109-020-00286-y · Cited by 49
Schumann, S., Thomas, F., Ehrke, F., Bertlich, T., & Dupont, J. C. (2022) · Information, Communication & Society · doi:10.1080/1369118x.2021.1907435 · Cited by 24
Metadata
- Authors
- Castanho Silva, B., Vegetti, F., & Littvay, L.
- Venue
- Swiss Political Science Review
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2017-08-30
- Volume
- 23
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 423-443
- ISSN
- 1424-7755 (ISSN-L)
- 1662-6370
- OpenAlex
- W2752629856
- Cited by
- 435
- References
- 57
- FWCI
- 118.06
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Elite Is Up to Something: Exploring the Relation Between Populism and Belief in Conspiracy Theories. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/spsr.12270
- The paper
- Castanho Silva, B., Vegetti, F., & Littvay, L. (2017). The Elite Is Up to Something: Exploring the Relation Between Populism and Belief in Conspiracy Theories. Swiss Political Science Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/spsr.12270
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.