Same but different? Patterns of susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs during the COVID-19 pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy tales about sinister powers supposedly controlling events gained traction. While many of these views have been present at societal fringes before, the quantity of citizens showing manifest signs of conspiracy beliefs increased visibly, which has profound consequences for civic society in liberal democracies. Yet, these citizens are also very heterogeneous in terms of ideological and socio-demographic background. Drawing on 14 panel waves from the German National Educational Panel Study from Germany ranging from 2008 to 2022 (N=5,624), we employ latent profile analysis to uncover to what extent we can identify qualitatively distinct groups regarding adherence to general conspiracy beliefs. In particular, we are interested in how structures of social inequality and political attitudes are interlinked in shaping these groups. To do so, we draw on rich individual-level information on political attitudes, educational decisions and returns to education, socio-demographic information, and affectedness by the pandemic and containment measures. Further, we add district-level information on incidence rates and government restrictions and combine these with measures of local demographic and economic structures to heed the importance of contextual data. Preliminary descriptive results show that, similar to other studies, roughly one quarter of respondents are inclined to conspiracy beliefs. This group portrays lower levels of political and social trust, while average political interest tends to be higher. In the upcoming analysis, we scrutinize to what extent this differs within the group of conspiracy believers and which social inequalities we can identify as drivers behind this expected heterogeneity. Thus, our exploratory study design provides vital insights into the manifestation of conspiracy beliefs during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we give a detailed account on the socio-demographic and psychological composition of the heterogeneous group of conspiracy believers based on a wide array of explanatory variables. Second, our study promises detailed insights into the role of social inequalities for susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs. Third, our data is drawn from a representative, national population sample, thus allowing for more generalizable conclusions than in previous works. Taken together, we present a comprehensive empirical analysis of one of the most pressing challenges for democratic societies across the globe.