Anything but Representative Democracy: Explaining Conspiracy Believers' Support for Direct Democracy and Technocracy

Abstract

Conspiracy theories gained considerable attention during the Covid-19 pandemic. Although studies have extensively explored their (mostly) negative impacts on various political and social aspects, like participation, health-related behavior, and violence, their influence on support for democracy remains relatively unexplored. The few existing studies offer conflicting findings, prompting my focus to shift from assessing generic support for democracy to examining preferences for alternative decision-making models. To address some limitations of prior research on alternative models of decision-making, I combine a trade-off item with a ranking methodology: respondents were prompted to indicate their first and second preferences for different democratic and non-democratic models over representative democracy. The study is based on data from a representative survey in Germany (July/August 2022; N = 2,536). My findings confirm that the belief in conspiracy theories is positively associated with a preference for direct democratic decision-making. However, conspiracy believers also favor expert-based decision-making over elected politicians - but direct democracy would be their primary choice. Although the evidence for a preference for autocracy over representative democracy is associated with a higher degree of uncertainty, it does suggest that conspiracy believers tend to favor "anything but" representative democracy. These findings contribute to the broader discourse on the impact of conspiracy beliefs on democratic systems.