I have been studying conspiracy theories for about ten years now. When I started, I did not expect that the topic would become as important as it has become, particularly from 2016 on. I would like to be able to say that I had the foresight to know that they would eventually come to dominate our political discourse, but I didn’t. In fact, I expected the exact opposite: that conspiracy theories would continue on a downward trend of losing importance over time. The data a colleague of mine and I gathered suggested that the United States was on such a trajectory since the 1960s, but unfortunately that data collection effort ended in 2010 (Uscinski and Parent 2014).
I would also like to be able to say that I had the idea to study conspiracy theories myself. But, alas, I have to give the credit to my colleague for that. As a political scientist, conspiracy theories were well off the beaten path of political science ten years ago, and there hadn’t been much research into them in other social science fields either. At the time, I wasn’t even sure what we would study, exactly. This may sound ironic now, but I didn’t think that conspiracy theories either affected or were affected by politics in any way. The only thought I had really given to conspiracy theories was in the early 1990s when the Oliver Stone movie JFK came out. So, when my friend and colleague Joseph Parent pitched me on the topic, I thought he was joking. I would have preferred to work together on something more mundane and was therefore inclined to turn him down. Looking back now from a career standpoint, it’s a good thing I did not.
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