Anything but Representative Democracy: Explaining Conspiracy Believers’ Support for Direct Democracy and Technocracy

The Great Exchange, rigged elections, climate change as a hoax, viruses (e.g., HIV, COVID-19) originating in government laboratories, and George Soros as the mastermind of many evils are just some of the conspiracy narratives that have not only fueled political debate in liberal democracies around the globe. Although studies have extensively explored their (mostly) negative impacts on various political and social aspects like participation, health-related behavior, and violence, the link between conspiracy beliefs and attitudes towards representative democracy remains a blind spot in the literature. The few existing studies, moreover, present contradicting findings. While some studies (Pantazi et al. 2021; Reiser & Küppers 2022) find that conspiracy believers are not opposed to democracy per se, but support certain forms of democratic government such as direct democracy or stealth democracy, others (e.g., Papaioannou et al.2023; Pickel et al. 2022, and Yendell et al. 2022) suggest that conspiracy belief is associated with a rejection of the idea of democracy or even a preference for autocratic models of government. One explanation for these mixed findings is an ‘anything but’ attitude towards representative democracy. Another reason for the unclear findings may be the design of previous survey questions. To address some limitations of prior research, I combine a trade-off item with a ranking methodology: respondents were prompted to indicate their first and second preferences for different democratic and non-democratic models over representative democracy. The study is based on data from a representative survey in Germany (July/August 2022; N=2,536). My findings confirm that the belief in conspiracy theories is positively associated with a preference for direct democratic decision-making. However, conspiracy believers also favor expert-based decision-making over elected politicians––but direct democracy would be their primary choice. Although the evidence for a preference for autocracy over representative democracy is less clear, it does suggest that conspiracy believers tend to favor ‘anything but’ representative democracy. These findings contribute to the broader discourse on the impact of conspiracy beliefs on democratic systems.