The last two decades have seen the rise of populist movements all over the world. Populists are or were at some point governing, among others, in Hungary, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, and Norway, sometimes alone, sometimes as part of coalitions. Even where they are not (yet) officially in power, as in Germany, they have grown stronger and shape the political agenda, as the Brexit campaign or discussions about the refugee “crisis” in Germany and other countries show. Populism therefore constitutes a phenomenon we need to understand. When is it dangerous for democracy, and can it also have beneficial effects? Conspiracy theories have also significantly gained in visibility and impact over the past twenty years, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, and they have been playing a major role in the debates about populism. The two phenomena are obviously connected. Populist leaders – from Trump to Maduro, and from Orban to Bolsonaro – regularly employ conspiracist rhetoric, and as number of studies have shown, the followers of populist parties and movements tend to believe more in conspiracy theories than others.
However, the exact relationship between populism and conspiracy theory remains understudied. We know comparatively little about the significance of conspiracy theories for specific populist movements; we do not know yet if conspiracy theories are always part of the populist repertoire, and it remains to be seen if conspiracy theories are, as is sometimes claimed, more relevant to right-wing than to left-wing populism. The PACT project has provided a robust account of the relationship between populism and conspiracy theory. On the one hand, it has done detailed case studies of populist parties and movements in selected countries; on the other, it has bundled its findings in a general theorization of the relationship between populism and conspiracy theory. Across regions and countries, the safest indicator for how prominent conspiracy theories are within a specific populist movement is the status that conspiracism occupies in the given political culture. We usually tend to think of conspiracy theories as a form of counter knowledge and as stigmatized. This is still the case in Germany, Austria, Italy and parts of the public sphere in the United States and Brazil. However, in Poland and Hungary conspiracy theories apparently never underwent the process of stigmatization that turned them from official into subjugated knowledge after World War II in other parts of the world. Accordingly they are widely accepted and can be articulated openly, and therefore they are an integral part not only of populist discourse in these countries but also of political discourse more generally. Put generally, the more accepted conspiracy theories are in a given political culture, the more explicitly can they be articulated and the more important and the less divisive they are for populist parties and movements.
