LAUSR

“predisposed” to conspiracy theory, then the authors’ conceptual work, and especially their notion that conspiracy theorizing is simply relegated to “losers,” seems miscast or at least confusingly labeled. Either we are all losers or conspiracy theories are as much a mainstream rhetorical device as they are a marginal political phenomenon. This is a complex question, for which political science’s empirical bent might help us figure out. The answer, the authors claim, lies in their data sets. One is a poll of 1,230 Internet users—certainly an informative way into the issue. By itself, however, it is unlikely to provide the foundation for a new theory of conspiracy theorists, especially as it is limited to a particular sample of users at one moment in time that self-reports their beliefs and a limited array of their behaviors. A second, more fraught, study is of letters to the editor published between 1890 and 2010 in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune that appear to concern conspiracies, defined broadly. This is a qualitatively fascinating snapshot into fringe and mainstream concerns throughout the period, and the book’s list of sample plots from across 120 years offers a bizarre and sometimes hilarious history of periodic obsessions. But what do these letters tell us quantitatively? To the authors, they demonstrate that we are in a relatively quiet period for conspiracy theories, since fewer appear in recent years than in the past. But can we trust this as evidence? The authors’ literature review of other studies that have relied upon letters to the editor is quite unpersuasive for their historical argument, as the best of them focus on letters published in a narrow period of time that concern high-salience, single issues. Can we assume that as newspapers and the news industry have changed over more than a century, the selection process for their letters page remains identical or at least close? Are the published letters of one period as representative of public opinion and conspiracy belief as those of another? The authors barely analyze their third data set, a content analysis of news posts that mention “conspiracy theory” over a 12-month period between 2012 and 2013. A monograph that promises to at least make dramatic strides toward explaining a complex social and political phenomenon and tomove the field beyond where previous qualitative studies have gone needs more support than this one provides. Another problem is the authors’ understandable effort to appear nonpartisan and unaligned in stressing that conspiracy theories can come from the Left and Right. Their repeated equivalence of left and right and Democrat and Republican fails to adequately note how the powerful political institutions of the Right have demonstrated far greater willingness—whether during the McCarthy era or the present—to espouse conspiracy than those of the Left. Whereas only a handful of marginal Democrats embraced the 9/11 Truth movement, the GOP nominated Donald Trump (whose campaign ventured wider into conspiratorial territory than the birth certificate), and the vast majority of party leaders refused to denounce the theories he espoused during the campaign. Whatever one thinks of Bernie Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s populist claim that the financial system is rigged against the working class, they are not equivalent to Donald Trump’s claims that the president was born in Kenya or that Ted Cruz’s father was present for President Kennedy’s assassination. The first chapters are an excellent, level-headed introduction to the field, and their discussion of polling data is insightful and helpful. Political scientists should take conspiracy theories seriously, and the book’s final chapter rightly takes a humble approach to the notion that the phenomenon constitutes a pathology that should and can be “cured.” But the empirical studies do not persuasively support the authors’ claims to have solved the most vexing riddles concerning who believes in conspiracy theories and why. As a student of conspiracy theories who takes a qualitative approach, I look forward to further studies from these authors and other political scientists that can help us understand this complex phenomenon.