15:30 - 17:45
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
William L Allen
Discussant/s:
Dominik Schraff
Meeting Room I

Dominik Schraff, Sven Hegewald
Ethnic diversity and political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic

William Allen, Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij
Winning the Battle or Worst of the Bunch? How COVID-19 Mortality Data Impacts Perceptions of Government Performance and Health Attitudes

Daniel Devine, Hannah Willis, Will Jennings, Gerry Stoker, Lawrence McKay, Jennifer Gaskell, Viktor Valgardsson
The causes of trust in government: evidence from conjoint experiments

Jakob-Moritz Eberl, Robert Huber, Esther Greussing
From Populism to the ‘Plandemic’: Why populists believe in COVID-19 conspiracies

Constanza Sanhueza
Severity, economic relief or transparency? Experimental evidence on support of and compliance with Covid-19 prevention measures across Europe
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From Populism to the ‘Plandemic’: Why populists believe in COVID-19 conspiracies
Jakob-Moritz Eberl 1, Robert Huber 2, Esther Greussing 3
1 University of Vienna
2 University of Salzburg
3 TU Braunschweig

Why are COVID-19 conspiracy theories so prevalent? Particularly, why would some citizens ignore scientific evidence and common logic but, instead, be convinced that COVID-19 was a military experiment or spread by 5G signals? Why would they believe that Bill Gates had anything to do with it? In this contribution, we argue that populism is at the centre of these beliefs, as the complex nature of the COVID-19 pandemic makes it an ideal playground for populists’ opposition to scientific and political elites. We use Structural Equation Models and panel survey data (n = 823) from the Austrian Corona Panel Project to test this argument. We demonstrate a negative correlation of populist attitudes with both trust in political and scientific institutions, which, in return, negatively relate to COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs. This results in an overall positive relationship of populist attitudes and conspiracy beliefs that is independent of political ideology. These findings have important implications for elite communication regarding virus mitigation.

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