Populist Attitudes and Belief in Conspiracy Theories about COVID-19: The Hard Case of Portugal

In recent years, researchers have found a tendency for individuals who score high in terms of populist attitudes to be more likely to believe in conspiracy theories (e.g. Castanho Silva et al, 2017, Balta et al. 2021, van Prooijen et al. 2022). While the concrete focus of the conspiracy theories explored has varied, the advent of COVID-19 has sparked an interest in how populist attitudes could influence the acceptance of conspiracy theories about the nature of the virus, vaccines or measures aimed at mitigating their impacts (e.g. Eberl et al., 2021, Stecula and Pickput, 2021). In this article, the purpose is to test the relationship between populist attitudes and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 in a context marked by a considerable incidence of the virus and, at the same time, notable depoliticization of the topic (Silva et al., 2021): 2021 Portugal. The expectation is that, as there were no clear clues from populist political elites, the relationship between populist attitudes and belief in conspiracy theories about COVID-19 in Portugal will be feeble, being such beliefs mainly the result of objective individual characteristics (such as age) or perceptions of fragility vis-à-vis the pandemic threat. By focusing on the Portuguese case, this paper shows how the impact of populist attitudes on belief in conspiracy theories is prominently context dependent.