The apparently democratic character of referendums faces myriad critiques. One of them is the influence that the opinions of voters on other issues, whether or not relevant to the decision at hand, may exercise on their vote in a referendum. As this New York Times piece explains, when confronting complex choices, voters facing either information overload or information deficits might […]
Conspiracy theories about the 2015 UK general election result. For example:
What does a conspiracy look like? What are its visible, outward signs? The visual images that we associate with the idea of conspiracy often relate to secret plotting, to scenes that emerge into public view only fleetingly – even if their effects are long-lasting – or to events that occur outside public sight: ‘hidden hands’ […]
‘I have no evidence’, wrote Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, ‘but no doubts either’. So the president of Argentina announced on Facebook and her website her conviction that Alberto Nisman, special prosecutor for the AMIA bomb attack of 1994, had not committed suicide on Sunday 19th January but had been the victim of a political murder plot.
Project Director Professor David Runciman spoke to the Humanities Society at Wolfson College, Cambridge University in May 2014. Arguments about climate change are rife with conspiracy theories. There are those who think the whole thing is a giant hoax: a scam cooked up by environmentalists and left-wing scientists to empower governments and rip off consumers. […]
Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt (Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University) visited the project in May 2014. Holocaust denial, the attempt to deny that the Third Reich engaged in the annihilation of approximately of six million Jews, has been depicted as a serious threat to historical truth. Others have dismissed […]
We recently had a visit from Joe Parent and Joe Uscinski, associate professors in political science at the University of Miami, who gave a public talk based on their forthcoming book: Conspiracy Theories in America (Oxford University Press). It was a great talk. They’ve put together a highly original data set, and they use […]
Last year Hugo wrote on the blog about an article called “NASA Faked the Moon Landing – Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science“, by Stephan Lewandowsky, Klaus Oberauer and Gilles Gignac. Their main finding, based on a survey of climate-blog visitors, was that “endorsement of free market […]
Nice blog post by a pseudonymous colleague (whose identity is not so secret that he cannot be unmasked after a few moments of assiduous link-following!) He (for it is a he — or perhaps one should say ‘an he’) postulates six rules for a well-formed CT: Rule 1. Lack of evidence proves that there is […]
On the question of the use of the term “conspiracy theory” the trajectory over recent decades is pretty clear. It’s on the up. This is just a search for “conspiracy theory” OR “conspiracy theories” in the title of articles on google scholar, excluding patents and citations. It’s only in the early 1950s that we find […]