Does Exposure to Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories Affect Perception of Government’s

Performance amid the COVID-19 Pandemic?

A Survey Experiment in the United Kingdom

Andrew Hunter Damien Bol

King’s College London King’s College London

Registered Report

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic poses significant challenges to governments worldwide. These
challenges include handling the public health risk while simultaneously minimising the economic
impact of the crisis and ensuring the support of citizens. At least in the early stages of the pandemic, it
appears the governments of established Western European democracies have been successful in
gathering the approval of citizens as they attempt to manage the crisis (Bol et al., 2020). Nevertheless,
the ability of governments to maintain this support is a vital factor in ensuring longer-term compliance
with government guidelines as states move out of lockdown and into a new phase of the pandemic.
Political support has been linked to improved policy effectiveness in numerous cases such as
environmental conservation (Steinberg, 2005) and previous epidemics (Fast et al., 2015) etc. There are
indeed many sources of decay in the long-term perceptions of government performance during a time
of crisis.1 However, one which has already gained attention in the nascent coronavirus social science
literature is the impact of conspiracy theories (Freeman et al., 2020; Imhoff & Lamberg, 2020; Uscinski,
et al., 2020).

Conspiracy theories are defined by four characteristics; 1) the world is not as it seems, 2) there is
believed to be a cover up by powerful actors, 3) the theory is only accepted by a minority of people,
and 4) there is no evidence to support the theory (Freeman & Batall, 2017). Belief in such theories is
not necessarily rare, indeed Oliver and Wood (2014) find approximately half the US population believe
in at least one conspiracy theory. Moreover, these theories are particularly potent during times of crisis.
As Bale (2007) argues, they offer easily understood explanations of cause and effect for otherwise
complex and uncertain events. In a context of high anxiousness like the one of the COVID-19 pandemic,
people tend to seek and believe threatening information (Gadarian and Albertson, 2013).2 By attributing
responsibility for major events to a handful of clandestine actors, individual proponents of a conspiracy

1
These sources include the realization of the lack of governmental preparedness and frustration with the impact
of policies on one’s lifestyle.
2
According to the latest available YouGov data, approximately half of the UK population is “Somewhat” or “Very
Scared” of contracting COVID-19. For details, see: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-
reports/2020/03/17/fear-catching-covid-19
theory gain a sense of control over those events – i.e. simply remove the conspirators and the situation
itself can be resolved (Bale, 2007). The proliferation of conspiracy theories during times of disease is
by no means new. For example, the widespread outbreak of HIV in the 1980s/1990s has been a source
of numerous conspiracy theories (Bogart et al., 2010). With regards to the novel coronavirus, there are
already several examples of conspiracy theories concerning its origin and the policy responses it has
triggered. These theories can range as widely as the claim that the virus was deliberately created as a
biological weapon to the assertion there is no new virus at all (Imhoff and Lamberty, 2020).

Already, significant correlations between belief in these theories and attitudes and behaviours in
responses to the pandemic have been established. For example, in the US context, it has been shown
that partisanship is predictive of compliance with social distancing guidelines and belief in COVID-
related conspiracies (Uscinski et al., 2020). However, it should be noted, these results are contrasted
with null results from Gardarian et al. (2020), on the relationship between partisan endorsements and
support for particular institutions or policies. Meanwhile, Freeman et al. (2020) find observational
evidence of a negative association between conspiracy theory beliefs and adherence to government
guidelines. Moreover Miller (2020a) finds that a tendency towards conspiratorial thinking interacts with
the uncertainty caused by the pandemic to increase the susceptibility of individuals to these theories.
Indeed, she also finds that belief in one theory is predictive of beliefs in others, even when controlling
for standard correlates of conspiracy theory belief (Miller, 2020b). Nevertheless, to the best of our
knowledge, a specific causal mechanism between exposure to COVID-related conspiracy theories and
diminished approval of government’s handling of the pandemic is yet to be established. What is more,
we envision the effect being especially strong among populists due to a concordance between a
conspiratorial worldview and populism as a thin-centred ideology which contrasts ‘the people’ against
‘the elite’ (Mudde, 2004). Indeed, as noted by Merkeley (2020) this kind of anti-intellectualism
represents a sub-set of broader populist tendencies.

Therefore, to these ends, we propose a survey experiment conducted on a representative sample of the
UK adult population which examines the causal relationship between exposure to little-known
conspiracy theories and support for government and its policy responses to the pandemic.3

Research Design

We will run an online survey experiment with a representative sample of 1,000 adults in the United
Kingdom. The survey will take an estimated 10 minutes to complete and will be fielded starting on 7
July 2020. In the survey, respondents will be randomly assigned into one of four experimental
conditions; two treatments and two controls.

3
The experiment raises obvious ethical concerns. We address these concerns in (1) only exposing participants to
conspiracy theories that have been around Twitter over the last months, (2) being very explicit at the end, that
these theories are not grounded in facts and most likely wrong (see below).
Respondents in the two treatment groups will be shown a set of statements (one per treatment group)
posted to Twitter in Spring 2020 describing a particular conspiracy theory (i.e., a theory which suggests
a deliberate cover-up by powerful actors which runs counter to official narrative and the beliefs of a
majority of people). We intend to test the effect exposure to these theories has on evaluations of
government and its performance. As such, we choose two conspiracy theories which directly implicate
the UK government so that the respondent may directly infer accountability on the part of the UK
government. The two conspiracy theories which we use can be summarised as follows. First, the Prime
Minister Boris Johnson never had coronavirus and staged his illness to garner public support and avoid
scrutiny. Second, the virus was a deliberate ploy by pro-EU forces to damage the economy and kill a
significant portion of the UK’s elderly population such that it made Britain re-joining the European
Union more likely. 4 The exact appearance of these stimuli is displayed in Figures 1 & 2.

It is important that respondents are not aware of the chosen conspiracy theories before the experiment.
If they are, the effect will be limited and most likely due to a priming effect. To assess whether the
survey treatment actually constitutes first-time exposure to their assigned conspiracy theory, we will
ask respondents to indicate whether they have heard this particular claim before. We expect between
70-90% of respondents to have never heard about these theories. Note that if some respondents already
knew the theories before the experiment, that will mean that the treatment effects will be underestimated
in the sense that these people might have already adjusted their perception of the government’s
performance.

In order to demonstrate the unique effect of these conspiracy theories, we include two control groups.
Respondents in the first control group will be shown no stimulus and will simply carry on with the
survey. Meanwhile, respondents in the second control group will be shown a criticism that the UK
government was warned of the potential for a respiratory disease epidemic but yet, remained unprepared
for the current crisis (the exact appearance of this stimulus is shown in Figure 3). We include these two
control groups to disentangle whether it is something specific about conspiracy theories which alters
public opinion or whether it is more generalised negative framing of government performance which is
driving the effect (Chong & Druckman, 2007).

4
These theories have been previously discussed by Freeman et al. (2020). They find that when asked to evaluate
degree to which they agree with the theories 26.5% of respondents agree to some extent, that politicians have
faked having coronavirus. Meanwhile, 22.4% of respondents agree to some extent, the virus is scaremongering to
prevent Brexit. The specific Twitter posts we exposed respondents to were found by searching words which would
likely be used to endorse such a theory, for instance ‘Boris faked coronavirus’ or ‘Covid Remainer ploy’.
Figure 1: Treatment 1 Stimulus
Claim: Boris Johnson Faked Having Coronavirus

Figure 2 – Treatment 2 Stimulus

COVID-19 and the Ensuing Lockdown is an Attempt to Make Re-joining The EU More Likely
Figure 3: Control Stimulus
Claim: UK Government Was Warned of the Risk of an Influenza Epidemic

After the treatment, respondents will then be asked to evaluate the extent to which they approve or
disapprove with the government’s handling of the crisis. For respondents in the control groups this will
mark the end of the survey. Meanwhile, respondents in the two treatment groups will be debriefed that
the statements they were exposed to in the course of the survey were not grounded in fact and the ways
in which the official account of events contradict these claims, after which the survey will end for them
as well.

Data

The survey will be administered starting 7 July 2020 and will last about 10 minutes. It will first ask
respondents to self-identify their socio-demographic characteristics, and then ask them questions about
their political attitudes and preferences. The sample will be composed of 1,000 British adults, made
representative of the population using age, sex and ethnicity quotas from the UK Office of National
Statistics.
As described above, we will derive two outcome variables –approval of government’s performance and
perceived accuracy of claims – from this experimental design.5 The second one will be used to test the
mechanism behind the main treatment effect. Moreover, in addition to the experimental condition, we
also include Kaltwasser & Hauwaert’s (2019) measure of populism as a political attitude as an
additional moderating variable.6

Moreover, we will add control variables. These control variables are important for the analysis of the
moderating effect that mobilises a variable that is not randomly assigned, i.e. populism. First, given
perceptions of the pandemic are likely to be impacted by one’s personal exposure to it – both in terms
of health and financial wellbeing – we will ask respondents to indicate the impact the virus has had on
their personal finances as well as the impact of it on their health and the health of those around them.
Second, to control for personal characteristics, we will ask respondents their age, gender, educational
attainment and income.

Hypotheses

The hypotheses for this project relate to the main and conditional treatment effects of the experiment.
For the reasons stated above, we expect that exposure to conspiracy theories will have an overall
negative effect on approval of the UK government’s performance during the crisis. What is more, we
expect exposure to conspiracy theories to have a greater negative effect for those individuals who hold
populist beliefs. This leads to our first set of hypotheses:

H1A: Exposure to a conspiracy theory (compared to critique grounded in fact and

to the non-exposure to any critique) has a negative impact on performance
evaluations of the UK government.

H1B: Exposure to a conspiracy theory (compared to critique grounded in fact and

to the non-exposure to any critique) has a negative impact on performance
evaluations of the UK government, especially among respondents with populist
attitudes

Still for the reasons presented above, we also hypothesise a relationship between populist attitudes on
the willingness to attribute accuracy to conspiracy theories. The reason is that it will help gain an
understanding of the mechanism behind the effects deciphered in H1B hypotheses above (if any). This
leads to the following hypothesis:

5
The questions pertaining to each of these outcome variables are: Perceived accuracy of claims: ‘How accurate
is this claim?’ (asked while stimulus is still visible). Note that this question is not asked for respondents in the
control group without stimulus. Government’s performance: ‘To what extent do you approve, or disapprove, of
the Government’s handling of the Coronavirus situation so far?’ (asked on the following screen).
6
This measure is derived from applying Item Response Theory to the responses of eight populist statements to
which, the respondent indicates their level of agreement/disagreement.
 H2: Populist attitudes are positively associated with the tendency to attribute
accuracy to conspiracy theories (compared to critique grounded in fact).

Analysis

To test hypothesis H1A, we will conduct difference-in-means t-tests. We expect the evaluation of
government’s performance to be lower when respondents are exposed to the conspiracy theories
compared to both control groups. Meanwhile, for hypothesis H1B, we will estimate two OLS
regressions – one with controls and one without – in the following form:

𝐺𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑃𝑒𝑟𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑖 = 𝛼 + 𝛽1 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 1𝑖 + 𝛽2 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 2𝑖 + 𝛽3 ∗ (1)

𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑙 2𝑖 + 𝛽4 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖 + 𝛽5 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 1𝑖 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖 + 𝛽6 ∗
𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 2𝑖 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖 + 𝛽7 ∗ 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑙 2𝑖 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚 + 𝜀

𝐺𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑃𝑒𝑟𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑖 = 𝛼 + 𝛽1 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 1𝑖 + 𝛽2 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 2𝑖 + 𝛽3 ∗ (2)

𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑙 2𝑖 + 𝛽4 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖 + 𝛽5 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 1𝑖 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖 + 𝛽6 ∗
𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 2𝑖 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖 + 𝛽7 ∗ 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑙 2𝑖 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚 + 𝛽𝑘 𝑋𝑖 + 𝜀

Government Performance is the evaluation of the government’s performance of individual i. Populism

is the level of populist attitude of the individual, and X denotes a vector of control variables. Finally, ε
is the error term, and α is the constant term. We expect each of the 𝛽 coefficients 1-3 to be negative as
exposure to both criticism and conspiracy decreases approval of governmental performance. Moreover,
we expect 𝛽1-2 to be larger in absolute terms than 𝛽3 because an exposure to a conspiracy theory should
lead to a larger negative effect compared to a criticism grounded in facts. We also expect negative
coefficients for β5 and β6 populist attitudes interact with exposure to conspiracy theories to further
increase scepticism of governmental performance. By contrast, we expect β7 to be close to 0 because
populist attitudes should not affect the reception of a criticism grounded in facts.

Finally, to test hypothesis H2 we will estimate another two OLS regressions with the perceived accuracy
of the assigned stimulus as the dependent variable and an interaction term between the treatment and
the populist attitudes in the list of independent variables. Once again, we estimate one model with
controls and one without.
 𝑃𝑒𝑟𝑐𝑒𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑑 𝐴𝑐𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑦𝑖 = 𝛼 + 𝛽1 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 1𝑖 + 𝛽2 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 2𝑖 + 𝛽2 ∗ (3)
𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖 + 𝛽3 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 1𝑖 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖 + 𝛽4 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 2𝑖 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖
+ 𝛽5 ∗ 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑙 1𝑖 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖 + 𝜀

𝑃𝑒𝑟𝑐𝑒𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑑 𝐴𝑐𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑦𝑖 = 𝛼 + 𝛽1 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 1𝑖 + 𝛽2 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 2𝑖 + 𝛽2 ∗ (4)

𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖 + 𝛽3 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 1𝑖 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖 + 𝛽4 ∗ 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 2𝑖 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖
+ 𝛽5 ∗ 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑙 1𝑖 ∗ 𝑃𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖 + 𝛽𝑘 ∗ 𝑋𝑖 + 𝜀

Where Perceived Accuracy is individual i’s evaluation of the accuracy of the stimulus to which they
were assigned and the remaining terms the same as equation 1. Here, we expect β3 and β4 to each be
positive as those with populist attitudes attribute greater accuracy to the two conspiracy theories. We
also expect β5 to be close to 0 because populists should not be more likely to believe the accuracy of a
critique grounded in facts.

Results
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