Conspiracism in Comparison: The Case of the United Kingdom

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.

The United Kingdom presents a paradoxical configuration of democratic strength and conspiratorial activity. At the aggregate level, it ranks among the least conspiracist countries in Europe, yet conspiracy narratives have gained renewed political purchase in recent years. Applying the TaCT-FoRSED comparative framework, this case study examines the prevalence of conspiracy theories at the macro, meso, and micro levels and relates it to democratic identity, resilience, and efficacy. The paradox is resolved by looking at the distribution rather than the mean of conspiracy susceptibility: a compact hard core of committed conspiracists and a larger susceptible middle coexist with a sceptical majority. Factors promoting conspiracism include a severe deficit in external political efficacy rooted in the first-past-the-post electoral system and a weak participatory infrastructure, the governance crises of 2019–2022 and the erosion of institutional trust, a populist right ecosystem around Reform UK that is embedded in conspiracist online networks, a concentrated and partisan press alongside fragmented digital news consumption, economic and regional inequality, and an uncodified constitution open to conspiracist appropriation. They are counterbalanced by robust institutions such as the Supreme Court, the BBC as a trusted epistemic anchor, high educational attainment, an adaptive civil society and fact-checking sector, and a long-standing parliamentary norm against conspiracy rhetoric. For the comparative analysis, the UK represents the clearest case of a mismatch between macro-level democratic quality and micro-level efficacy, and the Brexit referendum offers a unique quasi-experiment.