It is surprisingly difficult to convince voters of partisan conspiracy theories

The United States is the place to go for conspiracy theories, with older controversies surrounding the assasination of John F. Kennedy and the mood landing giving way to the ‘9/11 was an inside job’ tendency and more recently the supposed deception around Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Here, Joseph Uscinski takes a look at ‘partisan’ conspiracy theories in the United States, and finds that in order to buy into a partisan conspiracy theory, one needs to be both inclined to believe in conspiracy theories and have partisan inclinations that match the logic of the particular conspiracy theory, making it difficult to convince a huge swathe of voters.