Exploring the Extremes: The Impact of Radical Right-Wing Populism on Conspiracy Beliefs in Austria

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

1. Summary

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript. Please find the detailed responses below and the corresponding revisions and corrections highlighted in track changes in the re-submitted file.

2. Questions for General Evaluation

Reviewer’s Evaluation

Response and Revisions

Is the content succinctly described and contextualized with respect to previous and present theoretical background and empirical research (if applicable) on the topic?

Yes

Are the research design, questions, hypotheses and methods clearly stated?

Yes

Are the arguments and discussion of findings coherent, balanced and compelling?

Can be improved

See detailed response below

For empirical research, are the results clearly presented?

Yes

Is the article adequately referenced?

Yes

Are the conclusions thoroughly supported by the results presented in the article or referenced in secondary literature?

Yes

3. Point-by-point response to Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Comments 1: This article is a solid contribution to the mainstream literature on conspiracism. The research adds one more important case (given Austria's history and relationship to right-wing authoritarianism) to our social-psychological exploration of contemporary right-wing ideologies, making this case available to scholars researching the troubling rise of neo-fascist (my term, not the authors') movements in so many different places on the globe. I say "solid", not "original" because the study conforms to an approach, "symptomology," that has been criticized by Bratich (2019) and influenced my approach to the subject (Hellinger 2023). 

Response 1: Thank you for pointing this out. I agree that the approach of my paper may oversimplify the complexity of conspiracy beliefs by suggesting that conspiracy beliefs are a direct symptom or consequence of holding certain other political attitudes. However, in this paper, I am restricted to the Austrian case which hinders me to view conspiracy beliefs as more than symptoms of underlying psychological tendencies and more influenced by other social, historical, or cultural factors. I recognize that a more comparative approach would make it possible to address this better and test how much conspiracy beliefs can be attributed to these circumstances and conditions. However, I believe the focus on the Austrian case is also a strength in that it does provide me with a specific cultural and historical framework where the significant experience with radical right populism has played an important part in shaping citizens’ beliefs. By highlighting this historical legacy in the paper, I aim to incorporate the view that conspiracy beliefs and their attitudinal correlates are also embedded in historical and cultural conditions (page 2 lines 54-68, page 12 lines 394-410 and page 12 lines 442-443).

Comments 2: “This might best be appreciated by closer examination of the Bruder scale, five questions used to measure the independent variable, conspiracy mentality (CM), and the highly robust Pearson r’s that show conspiracy mentality explaining more than 30% of three different common conspiracy theories. Methodologically, one might, and should, suspect some degree of circularity.”

Response 2: I agree that circularity is a potential issue when analyzing conspiracy mentality and the belief in specific conspiracy theories. As previous literature has discussed, conspiracy mentality is an underlying tendency closely related to the belief in specific narratives. However, the focus of this paper is rather on how radial right wing populist attitudes relate to conspiracy beliefs, measured either as a conspiracy mentality or specific conspiracy narratives. This approach should highlight how radical right populist attitudes and conspiracy beliefs are related and thus show the robustness of the results by including different ways of measuring the dependent variable. To address the reviewers’ comments, I have, accordingly, revised the explanation of the Materials and Methods section to emphasize and clarify this point. The revisions can be found on page 5 lines 221-223.

Comments 3: “However, the larger question may be: Why are the correlations not even higher?  Can it be that the measures of the independent variable suggest that one can believe that political outcomes are often highly influenced by conspiratorial politics, but rational, conspiratorial capacity to assess the truth value of conspiracies? Let me add, though it may ring of the paranoid style to say it, that we social scientists might be concerned about how agencies tasked with security and detection of terrorist threats in the world (real and many, to be sure) might apply CM’s to identifying those who seem threatening because we hold beliefs, such as, “many very important things happen in the world, which the public is never informed about.””

Response 3: Thank you for this important point. I agree that conspiracy mentality is a difficult phenomenon to grasp solely through survey items. While single items included in these scales may not be able to fully grasp the complexity of the phenomenon, as for example using the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire scale or by summarizing the belief in various conspiracy theories into a single scale, their combination may provide us with a more comprehensive assessment of conspiratorial thinking.

I also appreciate your point regarding rational skepticism. In this paper, I want to refrain from making claims that believing in conspiracy theories or showing a more pronounced conspiracy mentality is either rational or irrational. Indeed, I personally would suggest a certain level of conspiracy mentality may be viewed as a healthy dose of rational skepticism. Regardless, the paper does not aim to address this question and instead aims to contribute to our understanding of conspiracy beliefs (in Austria specifically) and what part political attitudes like radical right populism (which in Austria has a strong foundation) play in this.

Still, I added a comment on this in the discussion section, pages 11-12 lines 383-398.

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

1. Summary

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript. Please find the detailed responses below and the corresponding revisions and corrections highlighted in track changes in the re-submitted files.

2. Questions for General Evaluation

Reviewer’s Evaluation

Response and Revisions

Is the content succinctly described and contextualized with respect to previous and present theoretical background and empirical research (if applicable) on the topic?

Can be improved

See detailed response below

Are the research design, questions, hypotheses and methods clearly stated?

Yes

Are the arguments and discussion of findings coherent, balanced and compelling?

Can be improved

See detailed response below

For empirical research, are the results clearly presented?

Yes

Is the article adequately referenced?

Must be improved

See detailed response below

Are the conclusions thoroughly supported by the results presented in the article or referenced in secondary literature?

Yes

3. Point-by-point response to Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Comments 1: This article is particularly successful in terms of its empirical basis. The research question is clear and the research gap is clarified.

However, some things should be improved: In particular, the terminology is unclear. The distinction between conspiracy mentality, conspiracy belief, conspiracy theory and conspiracy narrative should be emphasized more strongly (see for example: Sutton Robbie M./Douglas Karen M. (2023): What are conspiracy theories? A definitional approach to their correlates, consequences, and communication, in: Annu. Rev. Psychol. 74, pp. 271-298, doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-032420-031329.). There are also a number of suggestions in the research literature. These include studies, essays and books by Michael Butter, which are lacking overall.

Response 1: Thank you for your comment. I agree that the terminology used should be clarified upfront and then unified throughout the contribution. Thus, I added a short explanation in the introduction (page 1, paragraph 2) and adjusted the terms throughout the article (highlighted by track changes). Specifically, I dropped the term “narrative” and now only refer to conspiracy theories (CTs). Additionally, I added references to the works of -Michael Butter in this regard throughout the paper as well (visible through track changes).

Comments 2: The embedding in the research on the connection between populism and conspiracy theories should also be reconsidered: Missing are such important articles as Pirro, Andrea L.P., & Taggart, Paul (2023). Populists in power and conspiracy theories, in: Party Politics 29/3, pp. 413-423, https://doi.org/10.1177/13540688221077071; Smallpage, Steven M./Askew, Robert L./Kurlander, Eric A./Rust, Joshua B. (2023): Conspiracy thinking and the long historical shadow of Romanticism on authoritarian politics, in: Frontiers in psychology 14, 1185699, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1185699. Furthermore, important research findings in the study of conspiracy theories are only touched on in passing: 366/367. The reference to Barkun 2015 alone completely overlooks the research achievements of Mark Fenster (2008) or Peter Knight. 

Response 2: Thank you for this comment. I added the suggested articles to the discussion of the literature. The revisions can be found on page 3 lines 120-123 and lines 133-136. Additionally, I revised the discussion to include references to the works of Fenster and Knight, page 11 lines 380-388.

Comments 3: 147: It does not seem very clear that the NEOS are described as a center-left party. This should at least be questioned.

Response 3: I agree that the referenced sentence leads to confusion. The “center-left” is solely in reference to the SPÖ and thus I clarify this by adding “liberal centrist” before NEOS and “progressive left” before the Greens (page 3, line 148).

Comments 4: Minor comment: Sometimes the term “I” (47) is used, sometimes “we” (61). This should be smoothed out.

Response 4: Thank you for pointing this out. In this specific instance the “we” is correct as the survey was part of a larger project which I fielded together with colleagues. By adding this information, I clarify this in lines 61-64. (This is also revised on page 4, line 185-186 and on page 12 line 400).

4. Response to Comments on the Quality of English Language

Point 1: On the whole, this publication shows no weaknesses with regard to the use of English. There are a few typos such as 209: Burder should be Bruder. The translations from German into English should all be checked. "Bevölkerungsaustausch", for example, is called The Great Replacement in English (345/346)

Response 1: Thank you for these suggestions. I have revised the document accordingly. Regarding the translation of “Bevölkerungsaustausch”, it is true that the translation is The Great Replacement, but the literal translation is indeed population exchange. I clarified this within the brackets (page 11, line 346-347).