Just asking questions? Mapping social media conspiracism in Poland, Belgium, Greece, and Finland

Over the years, we witnessed an increasing public and academic concern over the epistemic foundations of democracy. Indeed, the nature of empirical reality underpinning public debate itself became contested. Arguably, the proliferation of conspiracy theories on social media constitutes a driving factor in counter-knowledge production. So far, scholars focused on the ‘bottom-up conspiracies’ arising at community boards while neglecting the agentic role of political parties in coining and propagating conspiratorial beliefs. This study aims to address this gap by mapping the frequency and patterns of conspiracist communication of party officials on X across four countries. To do so, we develop a novel measure of conspiracism. Based on the literature on populist communication, we expect conspiracism to be communicated in a fragmented way by invocations of evil conspirators, ominous plots, or deceit of the public. In distinguishing between populism and conspiracism, we hope to grasp a seeming affinity between the concepts. Based on this operationalization, we will code all posts of 10 (most active on X) politicians from all parties in parliament over six randomly selected months in the post-COVID-19 era (after March 2022). We will rely on human coding, as detecting conspiracist frames requires an in-depth understanding of the language and political context. Overall, the paper aims to introduce a novel mapping of top-down conspiracism in four countries that will provide insight into a relationship between conspiracism and populism and a cornerstone for future research.