Conspiracism in Comparison: The Case of Germany

This case study was composed using the TaCT-FoRSED framework for explorative case studies for conspiracism research (Christoph et. al. 2025). This is a pre-print of the case study to be published soon in an edited volume.

Germany combines strong democratic institutions – including a distinctive architecture of “militant democracy” – with a structurally embedded susceptibility to conspiracy theories. Overall levels of conspiracy belief are moderate by European standards, yet a stable minority of roughly a quarter to a third of the population holds conspiratorial orientations, concentrated among AfD supporters and in eastern Germany. Promoting factors include historically rooted cultural templates such as paternalistic expectations towards the state and a tradition of scepticism towards conventional medicine, a structural gap in external political efficacy, the persistent East–West divide, and meso-level actors such as the AfD, Querdenken, and the Reichsbürger milieu, which aggregate and institutionalise conspiracist narratives and are amplified by alternative media ecosystems. Inhibiting factors are high institutional performance, broad support for democratic principles, an extensive civic education infrastructure, strong public broadcasting, and a collective memory of Weimar and National Socialism that sustains vigilance against democratic backsliding. The case underlines the importance of sub-national variation and meso-level actors for the democracy–conspiracism relationship.