Conspiracy Exposure and Democratic Perceptions: Experimental Evidence from Türkiye

Conspiracy theories have become a prominent feature of contemporary political discourse and are increasingly seen as a challenge to democratic political culture. While a large literature documents correlational links between conspiracy beliefs and democratic attitudes, causal evidence on how exposure to conspiracy narratives affects citizens’ democratic perceptions remains limited, particularly outside consolidated Western democracies. This paper addresses this gap by examining the causal effects of conspiracy exposure on democratic attitudes in Türkiye, a context characterized by democratic backsliding and widespread elite-driven conspiratorial rhetoric. I report findings from an original online between-subjects survey experiment (N = 1,361) conducted in Türkiye. Participants were recruited through targeted Facebook advertisements and randomly assigned to receive either a conspiracy-themed stimulus or a neutral control message on the same topic, delivered in either text or video format. Following exposure, respondents evaluated core democratic principles, the perceived importance of democracy, political trust, political efficacy, and preferences for different regime types. The results show that even a single, brief exposure to a conspiracy narrative significantly reduces citizens' perceived importance of democracy and the importance they attribute to essential democratic principles. By contrast, the treatment does not produce robust average effects on political trust, political efficacy, or regime preferences. Effect sizes are modest but theoretically meaningful, given the minimal nature of the intervention. The findings suggest that conspiracy narratives primarily operate through an “erosion from within,” weakening citizens’ normative attachment to democracy rather than immediately reshaping institutional trust or regime evaluations. The study contributes experimental evidence from a hybrid regime context and highlights the vulnerability of democratic political culture to conspiratorial rhetoric in contemporary information environments.