Ignore, Rebut or Embrace: Political Elite Responses to Conspiracy Theories
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299231193570 |
| Author | Zim Nwokora |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299231193570
Political Studies Review
2024, Vol. 22(2) 280 –288
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/14789299231193570
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Ignore, Rebut or Embrace:
Political Elite Responses to
Conspiracy Theories
Zim Nwokora
Abstract
The attention to and concerns about conspiracy theories have increased in recent years, fuelled
by a surge in conspiratorial discourse during the Donald Trump presidency in the United States.
Responding to this development, the scholarship on how democracies should deal with conspiracy
theories has focused on what new regulations and institutions ought to be introduced to tackle
its threats to democracy. In this article, I consider this practical question from a different angle
by exploring the discursive strategies that are available to political elites when they encounter a
conspiracy theory. I flesh out three general strategies – ignore, rebut and embrace – and identify
the circumstances that shape when each strategy should be used in order to maximize the
effects of discourse as an anti-conspiracy mechanism. This perspective thereby aims to reveal the
elements of skill and nuance that are required of a politician who seeks to engage a conspiracy
theory in a way that advances democratic values.
Keywords
conspiracism, conspiracy theory, political elites, discourse, democracy
Accepted: 21 July 2023
Conspiracism is a complex phenomenon (e.g. Cíbik and Hardoš, 2022; Rӓikkӓ, 2009),
but it has been identified particularly with the effort to provide an unorthodox explanation
of a prominent event, contradicting the official or immediately obvious explanation.
Conspiracy theories often highlight secret scheming by powerful individuals. They also
aim for a kind of proportionality between events and their causes, rejecting what seem
like minor, trivial or merely coincidental causes of large events. This is why, for example,
conspiracists suspect that a lone gunman could not have assassinated President John F.
Kennedy. While the term ‘conspiracy theory’ today has pejorative connotations, this asso-
ciation is a modern development with origins in the mid-twentieth century (Koper, 2023).
And the standard assumption that a conspiracy theory is always false, which underlies the
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Corresponding author:
Zim Nwokora, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Highway,
Burwood, VIC 3125, Australia.
Email: z.nwokora@deakin.edu.au
1193570PSW0010.1177/14789299231193570Political Studies ReviewNwokora
research-article2023
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