Populism, Conspiracy Theories, and Fake News

Abstract

From the earliest academic accounts of populism, the tendency for populists to fall into conspiracy theory thinking has been observed. Now that scholarship on populism has moved out of the margins and out of the endless definitional debates, there is space to consider the secondary features of populism. The reversion to conspiracy theory represents one these features and can be considered a populist trope. Conspiracism provides a powerful tool to problematise inconvenient information and information sources. In practice the tropes of ‘fake news’ and establishment conspiracies are therefore intimately linked. This panel aims to develop an understanding of the relationship between populism, conspiracy theories and fake news discourses by combining papers on populist actors, populism and the media and drawing on cases from Europe and the US.