In case the reader didn't notice the description, it's worth noting up front that Parent and Uscinski are both professors of political science at the University of Miami--the former an international relations specialist, the latter an Americanist with a particular focus on media and public opinion--so this is a social scientific study of conspiracy theories, not just a compendium of conspiracy-related anecdotes.
The research question basically asks why people in the US believe conspiracy theories, with the key term defined as "an explanation of historical, ongoing, or future events that cites as a main causal factor a small group of powerful persons, the conspirators, acting in secret for their own benefit against the common good". Importantly, that does not label conspiracy theories as true or false--they can be either one. Some laborious data collection and analysis allows them to rule out a number of oft-cited factors as influencing the overall prevalence of conspiracy theories, including economic performance, the size of the government, social change, technological advancement, and political polarization (these all sound rather nebulous but are defined more precisely in the book and evaluated with specific measures typical to the research on those topics).
In addition to their arguments against conventional wisdom, they have a few key findings of their own. The big one is that the data suggest that political ideology and partisanship are not good predictors of whether people will hold and express belief in conspiracy theories. As they put it in a recent post for The Monkey Cage, a blog at the Washington Post, "Conspiracy theories aren’t just for conservatives." They tie this to a broader argument about power distributions. When one party is in power, partisans on the opposite side are more likely to espouse conspiratorial beliefs.
There's more to it, and it's well worth the quick read. Although the broader literature on conspiracy theories is not one with which I am terribly familiar and the conclusions are somewhat circumscribed by the available data, this is an interesting book that would seem to add some analytical rigor and theoretical parsimony to the study of conspiracy theories. Better yet, it's one of those rare academic works that is also highly readable.
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michele maskell
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 28, 2020
