Just a means to an end? Individuals support direct democracy instrumentally, irrespective of conspiracy mentality

Abstract

Conspiracy beliefs are considered a challenge to current democracies. One reason for this is that conspiracy believers tend to be less satisfied with the political status quo and more supportive of alternative types of governing, such as direct democracies. To gain a deeper understanding of this relationship, we investigated whether the relationship between conspiracy mentality, the general tendency to see conspiracies happening in society, and support for direct democracy is fueled by intrinsic values attributed to direct democratic decision-making or by the perceived personal benefit gained from it. In four pre-registered experimental studies (overall N = 1319), we informed participants whether their opinion on specific policies was shared by the majority or the minority of citizens. Subsequently, we asked them for their support for direct-democratic decision-making on this topic. The results indicate that, in general, people are more supportive of direct democratic decision-making when they think the majority shares their opinion, and people with a stronger conspiracy mentality tend to be more supportive of direct democracy. However, we found no evidence that conspiracy mentality moderates the effect of holding a position shared by the majority (vs minority) on support for direct democracy. An internal meta-analysis of the four experiments also found no evidence of such a moderation effect. Taken together, albeit previous research indicates that conspiracy believers are especially self-centered, our findings indicate that they are just as much influenced by majority and minority perceptions of public opinions as other people.