Conspiratorial Euroscepticism? Analysing the Effects of Conspiracy Beliefs on Voting Preferences in the 2024 European Parliament Elections

Despite their historical roots, conspiracy beliefs and scholarly interest in them have gained traction in the last decade, especially after Donald Trump’s controversial US presidency, the coronavirus pandemic, and the rise of populist parties worldwide. Once considered symptoms of ‘irrational thinking’ and as a phenomenon on the fringes, recent studies have shown that conspiracy beliefs are in fact far more mainstream than was previously assumed. Thus far, scholarly work on the political implications of conspiracy beliefs has often focused on researching the phenomenon in tandem with populist attitudes based on the tripartite resemblance of ‘people-centrism, anti-elitism, and Manicheanism.’ However, research on conspiracy beliefs and Euroscepticism has received relatively less attention compared to those studies that link the phenomenon with populism and populist attitudes. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by being one of the first attempts to analyse the effects of conspiracy beliefs on voting preferences in the recent European Parliament elections held from June 6 to June 9, 2024. Drawing on cross-country survey data from seven European countries, our results show an association between conspiracy beliefs and preferences for Eurosceptic parties, alongside a tendency for electoral abstention among some respondents. In this way, the present study implies the existence of a ‘conspiratorial Euroscepticism’ similar to the ‘populist conspiracism’ identified in previous research while also pointing to abstentionism as an alternative way of expressing disillusionment with the EU.