Will the Real Conspiracy Please Stand Up: Sources of Post-Communist Democratic Failure

At the start of the pandemic, it looked like the biggest COVID-related threat to democracy, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, was executive aggrandizement. This focus, however, may lead us to overlook a bigger threat to Eastern European democracy. We argue that Eastern European democracies’ original...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Perspectives on politics 2022-03, Vol.20 (1), p.222-236
Main Authors: Marinov, Nikolay, Popova, Maria
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accountability
Authoritarianism
Cleavage
Communism
Competition
Conspiracy
Democracy
Denialism
Immigration
Misinformation
Narratives
Pandemics
Political correctness
Politics
Polls & surveys
Populism
Postcommunist societies
Power
Reflection
Threats
Voters
World government
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Summary:At the start of the pandemic, it looked like the biggest COVID-related threat to democracy, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, was executive aggrandizement. This focus, however, may lead us to overlook a bigger threat to Eastern European democracy. We argue that Eastern European democracies’ original sin of state capture has been exacerbated by the rise of conspiracy theories, whose stock has only increased with the addition of COVID misinformation. Eastern European voters struggle to differentiate between the true political conspiracy that enables private interests to control the state and conspiracies without empirical basis, such as COVID denialism, world government, or political correctness as a tyrannical plot. As a result, conspiracy theories enable the state capture camp to divide the reformist opposition and maintain their grip, while simultaneously claiming that they are governing competently and in line with European values. We use an original survey from Bulgaria and a GLOBSEC 2020 cross-national survey to explore this hypothesis. Finally, we draw some theoretical implications from the empirical evidence for assessing the nature of democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe. We call for more research on the conspiracy cleavage as a factor in explaining backsliding processes.
ISSN:1537-5927
1541-0986
DOI:10.1017/S1537592721001973